Laleh Ispahani is Senior Policy Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she works on voting rights and international human rights. She represents the ACLU on the Right to Vote Campaign, a national collaboration of the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice and the Sentencing Project to promote felon enfranchisement. Ispahani’s work on human rights advocacy includes authoring the ACLU’s “shadow reports” on U.S. compliance with the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and advocating their contents before the treaty’s monitoring bodies. She recently also filed the first petition challenging U.S. felony disfranchisement policies in an international forum, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Ispahani is the author of numerous articles including "Is the Right to Vote a Criminal Matter?", Center for American Progress, and the book chapter Voting Rights, Human Rights” (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2008), and has authored or produced key felon enfranchisement resources, including the report Purged!, the international human rights and comparative law report Out of Step with the World: An Analysis of Felony Disfranchisement in the U.S. and Other Democracies, the documentary film Democracy’s Ghosts, and the toolkit VWI: Voting While Incarcerated.

Ispahani received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.

Alan Jenkins is Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and advocacy organization with the mission of building the national will to expand opportunity in America. He is co-editor, with Brian Smedley, of All Things Being Equal: Instigating Opportunity in an Inequitable Time (New Press).

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