John Bonifaz

John Bonifaz, legal director of Voter Action and guest of Voice of the Voters on July 18 and November 7, 2007, and May 7 and September 10, 2008.

John C. Bonifaz is the Legal Director of Voter Action, a national non-profit organization that engages in legal advocacy, research, and public education to help ensure election integrity in the United States. Prior to joining Voter Action, Mr. Bonifaz worked for more than a dozen years with the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), an organization he founded in 1994. NVRI served as a prominent legal and public education center dedicated to protecting the right to of all citizens to vote and to participate in the electoral process on an equal and meaningful basis. From 1994-2004, Mr. Bonifaz served as NVRI’s executive director and from 2004-2006, he served as NVRI’s general counsel. In January 2007, NVRI became formally affiliated with Demos, a New York-based public policy research and advocacy group, and Mr. Bonifaz served as a Senior Legal Fellow at Demos in its Democracy Program until May 2007 when he joined Voter Action.

Mr. Bonifaz has been at the forefront of key voting rights battles in the country over the past dozen years. He led the fight in the federal courts in Ohio for a recount of the 2004 presidential vote in that state. He has pioneered a series of court challenges that have helped to redefine the campaign finance question as a basic voting rights issue of our time. He has worked to defend laws passed at the state level which overhaul the campaign finance system and open up the political process to all candidates and voters, regardless of economic status.

From January through September 2006, Mr. Bonifaz took a leave from the National Voting Rights Institute to run as a Democratic candidate for Massachusetts Secretary of State, garnering nearly 130,000 votes in a primary fight against a 12-year incumbent.

As Legal Director of Voter Action, Mr. Bonifaz is overseeing state-based litigation across the country challenging the continued use of electronic voting machines for the counting and recording of our votes. He is also developing new legal challenges to the overall privatization of our public election process.

In the spring of 2007, Mr. Bonifaz served as an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, teaching a course on advocating for democracy in the United States.

Mr. Bonifaz is a 1992 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.