Voting Rights

Paul, Weiss’s advocacy in important voting rights cases dates back to 1963, when the firm won the landmark Supreme Court case Gray v. Sanders, which established the principle of “one person, one vote.”

We remain steadfast in our commitment, supporting recent voting rights actions in several courts nationally as counsel of record or counsel to amici curiae.

Below are some recent highlights:

• On March 15, 2022, Paul, Weiss, alongside the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, American Civil Liberties Union, and ACLU of Louisiana, filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the map of Louisiana’s congressional districts.
• Paul, Weiss, together with co-counsel Southern Coalition for Social Justice, secured an important victory when a North Carolina court struck down the state’s 2018 voter ID law. The court issued its ruling following a 14-day bench trial where the evidence sufficiently demonstrated that the voter ID law’s enactment was “motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent to target African American voters.”
• Paul, Weiss and the Brennan Center for Justice filed a voting rights case in federal court in Atlanta that resulted in an injunction barring Georgia from rejecting thousands of provisional ballots based on the state's corrupted, purged and potentially hacked voter registration database. The case sparked a 2019 provision requiring Georgia’s secretary of state to take steps to enhance the security of the state’s voter registration database.
• In 2015, on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice, we filed an amicus brief in Evenwel v. Abbott in support of Texas’ apportionment of state legislative seats on the basis of total population, rather than on the basis of eligible voters. In April 2016, the Court issued an 8-0 decision adopting the main arguments of our brief and siding in favor of the view that “one person, one vote” protects the representational rights of all people—not just those who are eligible to vote.
• Also teaming up with the Brennan Center, we successfully challenged attempts to restrict the voting rights of minority populations in various swing states. In Washington State, we filed the first lawsuit in the country challenging laws that deny citizens the ability to vote if their personal voter information cannot be matched from one government source to another.
• In a Florida case, we successfully challenged onerous new restrictions on community-based voter registration. In both the Washington and the Florida cases, the restrictions disproportionately impacted minority populations. Additionally, Paul, Weiss and the Brennan Center are advocating in state legislatures for automatic voter registration, an important issue that is gaining momentum, and against gerrymandering.