Sharon Priest

Sharon Priest was first elected Arkansas Secretary of State in November 1994. She currently serves as President of the National Association of Secretaries of State and as Chair of the National Election Standards Taskforce. She is also Chair of the Arkansas State Board of Election Commissioners. Prior to her current position, she was elected as both Vice-Mayor and then Mayor of Little Rock. In 1986 and in 1990, she was elected to serve on the Little Rock Board of Directors. She founded and ran the Devlin Company, a property management firm, from 1983-1986.

Lance Ward

Lance Ward is the Secretary of the Oklahoma State Election Board and Secretary of the Oklahoma Senate. He serves as Co-Chair of the Election Center�s national Task Force on Election Reform. He was instrumental in the implementation of the Oklahoma Election Management System (OEMS), which put in place an integrated, uniform statewide election system. Prior to his current position he served as Executive Director of the Higher Education Alumni Council of Oklahoma and as assistant to the President Pro-Tempore of the Oklahoma Senate.

Henry Cuellar

Henry Cuellar was appointed Texas Secretary of State by Governor Rick Perry and sworn in to his post in January 2001. Prior to his appointment, he served in the Texas House of Representatives for fourteen years. In the House he was a member of the House Appropriations Committee and as Chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Education. He is an attorney and a U.S. Customs Broker. He is a former educator at Laredo Community College and Texas A&M.

Carolyn Jefferson-Jenkins

Carolyn Jefferson-Jenkins is the president of the League of Women Voters of the United States and chair of the League of Women Voters Education Fund. During her tenure at the League of Women Voters, she has had oversight responsibility for the 1996 Get Out the Vote campaign, and the Wired for Democracy project. She is the author of The Road to Black Suffrage and One Man One Vote: The History of the African-American Vote in the United States. She has worked in the public and private schools, serving as a principal in the Cleveland and Cleveland Heights School Systems.

Joseph D. Rich

Joseph Rich is the Acting Chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. From 1987 until 1999 he was the Deputy Chief of the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, where he litigated and supervised litigation in the area of the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the Public Accommodations Act. He has also served as Deputy Chief of the Equal Educational Opportunities Section, where he litigated and supervised litigation in the area of equal education.

Scott Harshbarger

Scott Harshbarger is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Common Cause. Prior to joining Common Cause in 1999, he served two terms as Massachusetts Attorney General and was the Democratic nominee for Governor of Massachusetts in 1998. Before being elected Attorney General, he was Middlesex County District Attorney for eight years, and the first General Counsel to the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission. He has taught at Boston University Law School since 1980, and is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

Cleta Deatherage Mitchell

Cleta Mitchell is an attorney in the firm of Sullivan & Mitchell in Washington, D.C., where she specializes in campaign finance and election law. She was a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1976 to 1984, where she served as Chairman of the House Appropriations and Budget Committee from 1979 to 1982. She has organized many political campaigns on the local, state, and national level. She was director and general counsel at the Term Limits Legal Institute and has worked as a consultant to the National Federation of Independent Business.

Pamela S. Karlan

Pamela Karlan is the Montgomeray Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School. She taught at the University of Virginia School of Law from 1988 to 1998. She has written extensively on a wide range of legal issues, including election law and voting rights, with chapters in The Future of Voting Rights Litigation, in Census 2000: Considerations and Strategies for State and Local Government, and The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on African Americans: Second and Third Generation Issues in Voting Rights and Redistricting in the United States. Before teaching, she served as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she specialized in voting rights and employment discrimination.

Hilary O. Shelton

Hilary Shelton presently serves as director to the Washington Bureau of the NAACP. Prior to working for the NAACP, he served in the position of Federal Liaison, Assistant Director of the Government Affairs department of The College Fund/UNCF, also known as The United Negro College Fund. Prior to this he served as program director for The United Methodist Churches� social justice advocacy agency and the General Board of Church and Society.

James R. Gashel

James Gashel is the Director of Governmental Affairs at the National Federation of the Blind, where he has focused on public policy relating to the concerns of blind people since 1974. His responsibilities include all aspects of governmental relations, including legislative affairs, negotiations with legislators and government agencies, testifying before Congressional and other governmental hearings, and public outreach. Prior to this he served an assistant director at the Iowa Commission for the Blind and taught in public schools at the high school level.

Kenneth Huff, Sr.

Kenneth Huff serves as a member of the AARP Board of Directors. He was elected by the Board to serve as Vice President-Secretary/Treasurer and in that capacity serves as chair of the Board Audit and Finance Committee. He previously served a two-year term as National Treasurer of AARP. Prior to his election to the Board, he was the Associate State Coordinator for the AARP/VOTE Program and chair of the AARP�s national Economic Security Advisory Committee. As a certified public accountant, he retired from state government in 1977 as director of revenue estimates, comptroller of public accounts in the state of Texas.

Kenneth Huff's Testimony

Rodolfo O. de la Garza

Rodolfo de la Garza is Vice-President of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute and Mike Hogg Professor of Community Affairs in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. As a researcher he directed the first national survey of Latino political life and chaired the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/Social Science Research Council Joint Committee on Hispanic research. He continues to direct research that has resulted in a series on Hispanic public opinion and political participation, the most recent of which is Awash in the Mainstream: Latinos and the 1996 Election.

Maria Echaveste

Maria Echaveste is an attorney in Washington, D.C. She served until January 2001 as assistant to President Clinton and deputy White House chief of staff. Prior to this she was assistant to the president and director of public liaison. She was deputy director of personnel during the Clinton 1993 transition and was the national Latino coordinator for the president�s 1992 campaign. In 1993 she became administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor�s Wage and Hour Division. She is an attorney and has spent several years working for law firms in Los Angeles and New York, including work as special counsel in bankruptcy at Rosenman & Colin. She has also served as secretary of the New York City�s Elections Board.

John B. Anderson

John Anderson has served as president of the Center for Voting and Democracy since 1996. The Center studies how voting systems affect participation, representation, and governance and disseminates its findings to civic organizations, elected officials, journalists, and the public. He received six million votes as an independent candidate for president in 1980. Between 1960 and 1980, he served ten consecutive terms as a United States Representative from Illinois. He served as States Attorney in Winnebago County, Illinois for four years. He serves also as President and CEO of the World Federalist Association in Washington, D.C.

Norman J. Ornstein

Norman Ornstein is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He also serves as an election analyst for CBS News, is a member of the Board of Contributors for USA Today, and writes a column for Roll Call. He is currently leading a coalition of scholars and others in a major effort to reform the campaign financing systems and is co-directing a multi-year effort, called the Transition to Governing Project, to create a better climate for governing in the era of the permanent campaign. He makes frequent television appearances as a political commentator and writes regularly for the New York Times and the Washington Post.