Professor Daniel P. Tokaji is an authority on election law and voting rights. He specializes in election reform, including such topics as voting technology, voter ID, provisional voting, and other subjects addressed by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. He also studies issues of fair representation, including redistricting and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Professor Tokaji’s scholarship addresses questions of political equality, racial justice, and the role of the federal courts in American democracy, with a special focus on election administration. Among the publications in which his work has appeared are the Michigan Law Review, Stanford Law & Policy Review, and Yale Law Journal. He is a co-author of the casebook Election Law: Cases and Materials (4th ed. 2008) and co-editor of Election Law Journal.
His published articles include “The Future of Election Reform: From Rules to Institutions,” 28 Yale Law & Policy Review 125 (2009), “The New Vote Denial: Where Election Reform Meets the Voting Rights Act,” 57 South Carolina Law Review 689 (2006), “Early Returns on Election Reform: Discretion, Disenfranchisement, and the Help America Vote Act,” 73 George Washington Law Review 1206 (2005), and “First Amendment Equal Protection: On Discretion, Inequality, and Participation,” 101 Michigan Law Review 2409 (2003).
Media outlets have frequently sought Tokaji’s election law expertise, and The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Columbus Dispatch, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and USA TODAY have all quoted him on the subject. He also has appeared on TODAY, FOX News, NBC News, and National Public Radio.
A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School, Professor Tokaji clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Before arriving at Ohio State, he was a staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and Chair of California Common Cause. He has litigated many civil rights and election law cases. He was lead counsel in a case that struck down an Ohio law requiring naturalized citizens to produce a certificate of naturalization when challenged at the polls. He was also an attorney for plaintiffs in cases that kept open the window for simultaneous registration and early voting in Ohio’s 2008 general election, and that challenged punch-card voting systems in Ohio and California after the 2000 election.
Professor Tokaji sits on the boards of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Central Ohio.