In the decades after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, Congress and the Courts finally took steps toward realizing real multiracial democracy in the United States. In 2013, however, the Supreme Court suspended a key provision of the VRA, severely weakening protections for nonwhite voters. This has had disastrous consequences in the past decade, and, in many ways, we find ourselves in a similar legal landscape to that prevalent prior to the passage of the VRA. Dr. Kevin Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice will discuss the parallels between the midcentury environment and today, and detail the effects of unraveling of the VRA, drawing from research from a forthcoming book on this subject.

Kevin Morris is a Senior Research Fellow and Voting Policy Scholar at the Brennan Center for Justice, where his work focuses on voting rights, election administration, and the effects of the criminal legal system on political participation. Much of his work addresses important public policy and social justice issues, using innovative and cutting edge statistical tools to connect a massively large, twenty year national vote file with billions of records joined to geospatial information on things like occurrences of different types of police violence, residential location near formerly incarcerated citizens, or having a family member die of COVID-19 impacts voter turnout and other ways of political engagement.

His scholarly work has been published in journals like the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Politics, while his public-facing writing and Congressional testimony has received a wide audience outside the academy.  Dr. Morris’s work has been cited by state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court.

His public scholarship includes the recently released report, “Growing Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout, 2008-2022”, the first and more comprehensive tracking of the racial turnout gap and the ongoing impact of the Shelby County v. Holder decision.

 Dr. Morris received his bachelor's degree from Boston College, a masters degree in urban planning from the NYU-Wagner School, and a PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center.