Student Voting Course Funded by the Mellon Foundation Concludes on Tuesday, November 28, with Public Panel Discussion

With many state and local elections having just taken place, and with the focus shifting to national elections in 2024, a unique course is just coming to an end before it runs again in fall 2024. The course, “Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy,” uses the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlaws age-based voter discrimination, as a prism through which to examine the history of voting rights in the United States, particularly issues of race. The course, which is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, was co-designed by faculty whose institutions have played an important role in the fight for youth voting rights: Tuskegee University in Alabama, Prairie View A & M University (PVAMU) in Texas, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCAT), and Bard College in New York, as well as Yael Bromberg, Esq., a voting rights attorney and lecturer at Rutgers Law School who is a leading national scholar of the 26th Amendment.
 
The course is concluding with an online panel discussion on Tuesday, November 28, at 12–1:30pm EST, which is open to public registration. To register, please send your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and phone number to [email protected]. Incomplete or unverified registrations will not be processed.

The closing panel features:

• North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, who previously served as Co-Executive Director and Voting Rights Chief Counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, where she litigated numerous precedential voting rights lawsuits across the South, including two before the United States Supreme Court – a Texas redistricting case in 2018, and in 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause, the partisan gerrymandering case arising from North Carolina. 
• Evan Milligan, Executive Director of Alabama Forward, a civic engagement network committed to “building power around progressive civic issues and movement towards greater freedom.” Milligan served as lead Plaintiff in Allen v. Milligan, a 2023 Supreme Court case in which it was ruled that Alabama’s new congressional district map violated the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by diluting the votes of Black residents.
• NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund Attorneys John Cusick and Steve Lance, legal team members in a recent significant Twenty-Sixth Amendment voting rights case on behalf of PVAMU students, who have also litigated other voting rights and civil rights matters and advance related policy reforms.

The course previously featured an opening panel of contemporary youth leaders including David Hogg, co-founder of Leaders We Deserve and March for Our Lives; Brianna Cea, executive director and founder of Generation Vote; and Evan Marlbrough, managing organizer at Our Turn and board member for The Andrew Goodman Foundation.  

Post Date: 11-16-2023