Staff

Jessica Marsden

Counsel

Jessica Marsden oversees Protect Democracy’s work to ensure free and fair elections, including litigation and advocacy around voting rights and disinformation, as well as Voteshield. She has also led work to combat partisan interference in election administration and to end the use of insecure voting technologies. Before joining Protect Democracy, she launched the Veterans Legal Assistance Project at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she was an Equal Justice Works Fellow. She has also served as a clerk to the Honorable Susan L. Carney of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Keith P. Ellison of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Jessica received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Yale College.

Work Themes

Featured in the Press

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‘It has to be done’: can Reconstruction-era laws hold Trump and allies accountable? (opens a new window)

  • November 26, 2023
  • The Guardian

“Congress in the 1860s and 70s gave us a toolkit that is surprisingly well-suited to this moment,” Marsden, of Protect Democracy, said.

The laws from that time period were written with an understanding that opponents of democracy would be “quite creative” in how they’d try to deter people from participating in the democratic process, leaving open what kinds of actions can be considered voter intimidation, Marsden said.