Kevin T. Morris, PhD

Senior Research Fellow & Voting Policy Scholar · Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law

I'm a political scientist studying how laws, institutions, and political rhetoric shape who participates in American democracy—and who doesn't. My work spans voting rights, election administration, the criminal legal system, and the role of racial resentment in driving both voter suppression policy and public belief in election fraud.

My research draws on large-scale administrative and survey data, including individual-level voter files covering every federal election since 2008. This work has been published in journals including the American Political Science Review, Science Advances, and the Journal of Politics, and has informed congressional debate, federal litigation, and national policy discussions.

Email · Bluesky · Google Scholar · Brennan Center Profile

Selected Highlights

New Book

An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — The Voting Rights Act, co-authored with Michael G. Miller, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in October 2026.

Courts
            Research on the racial turnout gap cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024). Work also cited by state and federal courts in voting rights litigation.
          

Policy
            Analysis finding that 21 million Americans lack readily available proof of citizenship became a central empirical reference in the national debate over the SAVE Act, cited by members of Congress, FactCheck.org, and major news outlets.
          

Congress
            Testified before the U.S. House Committee on House Administration, Subcommittee on Elections, on the effects of polling place closures and voting restrictions on political participation (2021).
          

An American Problem

With Michael G. Miller · Princeton University Press · October 2026

The Voting Rights Act's preclearance requirement—which compelled jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to prove that changes to their election systems would not harm minority voters—was suspended by the Supreme Court in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder. This book traces the development and dismantling of that landmark protection and documents the consequences for American democracy.

Preorder from Princeton University Press →