Deep Dive with Heather Gerken on Voting

Kelly Corrigan (0:09)

Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders, I'm Kelly Corrigan, and today I'm wondering about something about you're wondering about too. How to protect the cornerstone of our democracy, elections. And not just the big one, but the small local races that affect our lives as much or more than who controls Congress. My guest is Heather Gerken. Heather spent much of her career as a constitutional law professor, eventually becoming Dean of Yale Law School. But in 2025, she made an unusual jump. She gave up her tenure to become the 11th president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion charitable organization.

Today, Heather and I talk about voting. What happens behind the scenes to keep a polling place safe? Why mail-in ballots matter to everybody? What any one person can do to help protect an election and more? Here's my conversation with Heather Gerken, recorded at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

I wonder what drew you to the law, and when was the first time you thought, oh, I think I've been captured by an idea and a vision for my future.

Heather Gerken (1:25)

You know, it's funny, because I did a lot of volunteering work in college and always felt like I was doing band-aid work, and it seemed like there was a structure out there, and the structure needed to be fixed, to fix the problems. Now, that was when I was 20 years old and wildly naive, and now I know a lot more, and I'm a little bit more cynical, but that's what brought me to the law.

Kelly Corrigan (1:43)

And what was your first step towards it? Were you pre-law?

Heather Gerken (1:47)

No, I hated all the pre-law students. I found them-

Kelly Corrigan (1:50)

And if they're listening today.

Heather Gerken (1:51)

And if you're listening today, I thought you were all kind of annoying. So I ruthlessly avoided them and just focused on all kinds of other things. So I got to law school a little bit green.

Kelly Corrigan (2:00)

Yeah, and then you zeroed in on the Constitution.

Heather Gerken (2:03)

I did, and election law.

When I first was in law school, it was just when they started teaching election law as a subject. Now that seems silly because it's such a big and important field of thought. But back then I had a professor who said, you have to take my election law course. I thought it was ridiculous idea and told him I needed to take evidence instead so I could practice. But he conned me into it and it turned out to change my life because that is what I've done all of my life. I was early days of my being a lawyer, I was a voting rights lawyer. I've been working election reform literally all my career. And even my constitutional work is really closely related to elections.

Kelly Corrigan (2:40)

And can you say why?

Heather Gerken (2:42)

Because one of the magic things about elections up until recently, when the Voting Rights Act has been eviscerated, was when people were thinking about the civil rights movement. There's lots of different protections put in, protect your ability to get housing, protect your ability to work. What was magic about the Voting Rights Act was it was a different model. And what it said is, we're not going to protect this individual or that individual from anything in particular, we're going to make it possible for groups, particularly black voters at that point, to choose their own destiny.

And it offered a really different picture, because if you think about the other pieces of the civil rights, I sort of imagined someone, a plaintiff, coming in and looking to the court as their hero. But the Voting Rights Act looked to blacks and Latinos as efficacious actors in their own right. It didn't give them anything in particular, but it created the opportunity for them to choose their own destiny. And that's what I loved about it. And so when I got to be a law professor, and spent a huge chunk of my career working on these issues, I was in the con law sphere, and I looked around the horizon, and no one else was thinking about the idea of what we call majority minority districts, except federalism scholars.

Federalism scholars celebrate the fact that states are widely varied, and that's a good thing for that. The trouble for federalism scholars is that they believe in things like state sovereignty, they get some sideways with protecting people, dissenters protecting racial minorities. And so my federalism work is almost entirely about the ways in which federalism and localism empower groups to choose their own destiny, and to change the world by virtue of the power they hold locally.