Lawrence D. Norden (born in Manhattan) is the Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
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Education and career
The son of a high school math teacher and an accountant, Norden majored in American history at the University of Chicago, after which he attended New York University School of Law. Prior to working at the Brennan Center, he worked as a corporate litigator at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan and as a bankruptcy lawyer at Hahn & Hessen.
Voting machines and registration
As a deputy director for the Brennan Center for Justice, Norden is known for his research on voting machines in the United States. For example, a 2011 study by Norden found that as many as 60,000 votes cast in New York elections in 2010 were invalid because when casting them, the voters accidentally voted for multiple candidates, a problem the study attributed to both software errors and ambiguous instructions. In 2013, he told NPR that one in eight voter registration records is inaccurate, and that because registration "doesn't follow people when they move, even though a lot of people think it does," poll workers cannot find the names of some voters on election day.
Campaign finance reform
He has expressed concern about the increased amount of money spent on the 2014 midterm elections, as well as the fact that the sources of this money are unknown, which he attributes to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. That year, he also co-authored a report looking at the effect of the Citizens United decision on the amount of money Mitch McConnell, a strong opponent of campaign finance reform, received when he was running for re-election against Alison Lundergan Grimes.