Stuart C. Naifeh currently serves as Manager of the Redistricting Project at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). Using litigation, policy, and public education strategies, Stuart works to ensure that districting lines established in the wake of the 2020 census protect and enhance the voting power of Black communities.
Prior to joining LDF, Stuart served as Senior Counsel at Demos, where he litigated voting rights matters, including cases enforcing the language access provisions of the Voting Rights Act, challenging aggressive purging of the voter rolls and other forms of voter suppression, and securing compliance with the National Voter Registration Act’s Motor Voter and public agency registration provisions. His cases included Rivera v. Lee (N.D. Fla. 2018), which resulted in Florida mandating bilingual elections throughout the state, and Common Cause Indiana v. Lawson (S.D. Ind. 2017), which successfully challenged Indiana’s practice of purging voters without notice based on the notoriously unreliable Kansas Interstate Crosscheck program.
At Demos, Stuart authored Driving the Vote: Are States Complying with the Motor Voter Requirements of the National Voter Registration Act?, the first nationwide analysis of compliance with Motor Voter program established by the landmark National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
Stuart also served as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, where he conducted investigations of financial and other corporate impropriety and represented clients in pro bono matters in the areas of immigration, prisoner civil rights, employment, and voting rights. He also previously held civil rights and environmental fellowships at Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen and Dardarian LLP (now Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho, LLP) and Altshuler Berzon LLP.
Stuart served as a law clerk to the late Honorable James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, where he served as Articles Editor for the Columbia Law Review, and his A.B. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.
