Nate Persily — Lessons from 2024 for the 2026 Election
Despite great fears that it would be marred by considerable administrative challenges, the 2024 election was well-run and smooth. However, controversies and conflict that did not receive attention given the comfortable margin of victory have signaled vulnerabilities for the 2026 election related to mail-in ballots, threats to polling places, and late counting of ballots. New executive orders and other novel threats to election administration and the seating of victorious House candidates are creating confusion as to whether the 2026 election will be run under the same rules as its predecessors. This talk will canvas the problems of 2024, the emerging threats of 2025, and the path for building resilience for the 2026 election.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute. He is co-Director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative and founded the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, the Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. He served as the Senior Research Director of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration and has been appointed by courts on numerous occasions to draw congressional and legislative redistricting plans. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow, examines the impact of social media and artificial intelligence on democracy and elections.
Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.
Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456
Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.
Nathaniel Persily
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.
