Jon Sherman serves as Litigation Director and Senior Counsel with Fair Elections Center, where he oversees and litigates cases to defend the right to vote around the country. He has served as lead counsel on two First Amendment cases challenging state officials’ arbitrary power to grant or deny voting rights restoration to people with felony convictions, Hand v. Scott, which—after a win in district court—became moot upon the 2018 passage of Amendment 4 in Florida, and the currently-pending lawsuit Lostutter v. Commonwealth of Kentucky, which recently returned to district court after the Center won its recent appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Other representative cases include numerous lawsuits in Wisconsin, including those combating a threatened unlawful purge of voters, unconstitutional restrictions on the use of college IDs as voter ID, and the negative effects of the COVID pandemic on mail-in voting in 2020; a pending suit in North Carolina, which secured a preliminary injunction allowing voters to cure absentee ballots with minor defects; and a successful challenge to Louisiana’s discriminatory proof of citizenship requirement for naturalized U.S. citizens, which forced the repeal of the state’s 142-year-old and unconstitutional voter registration requirement.
Jon frequently comments and writes on voting rights and election law issues in the media. His opinion pieces have been published in Slate, The Hill, Huffington Post, Louisville Courier-Journal, MLive, Arizona Capitol Times. He has been quoted in CNN, NPR, The Guardian, Salon, Tampa Bay Times, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, among other outlets.
Prior to joining Fair Elections Center in 2013, Jon clerked in Phoenix, Arizona for Judge Barry Silverman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He also litigated challenges to voter ID laws, Voting Rights Act lawsuits, and ballot access cases with the ACLU Voting Rights Project in Atlanta; clerked for Chief Judge George H. King of the United States District Court for the Central District of California; and worked as a litigation associate at WilmerHale LLP in Washington, DC.
During law school, Jon interned with Senator Russ Feingold’s Judiciary Committee counsel and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in Lahore. Mr. Sherman holds degrees from Columbia Law School and Harvard University.
He is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and a member of the bar for the following courts: U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, and U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
Jon can be reached at jsherman@fairelectionscenter.org
