Daniel Tokaji is the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Constitutional Law and Senior Fellow, Election Law at ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. He is an authority on the law of elections and democracy. He teaches courses on Election Law, Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, Civil Procedure, and Legislation. His scholarship addresses questions of voting rights, racial justice, free speech, and the role of the courts in American democracy.
Professor Tokaji is the author of Election Law in a Nutshell (2013), and co-author of Election Law: Cases and Materials (5th ed. 2012) and The New Soft Money (2014). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on a wide variety of election and voting issues, including voter ID, voter registration, voting technology, provisional voting, redistricting, campaign finance regulation, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recent articles include Responding to Shelby County: A Grand Election Bargain, 8 Harvard Law & Policy Review 71 (2014), and Applying Section 2 to the New Vote Denial, 50 Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review 439 (2015).
Media outlets frequently seek Professor Tokaji’s expertise on election and voting issues. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Columbus Dispatch, USA TODAY have all quoted him, and he 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.
Professor Tokaji has successfully litigated many civil rights, civil liberties, 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.