Gabrielle Goldstein in the Virginia State Capitol, Rachel Jeck with Register Her organizers, and Robert Tsai delivers a talk at the Lincoln Ideas Forum. Photos provided courtesy of subjects.

Election

Politically Inclined

Two BU Law grads lead successful grassroots organizations while Professor Robert Tsai proposes system reforms.

When Gaby Goldstein (’06) and a few members of a private Facebook group for progressive attorneys put up a website after the 2016 election seeking volunteers to help elect liberal candidates outside reliably blue states, the response was overwhelming.

Goldstein, who was in the final years of a PhD in health policy and had a full-time career as a health law attorney, was not prepared.

“There was tremendous interest,” she remembers. “Initially, we had no idea what to do with them all.”

They learned fast. Today, the Sister District Project she cofounded is a national organization with more than 70,000 volunteers. Goldstein finished her PhD and has taken a step back from legal practice; since 2017, she has worked full time at Sister District, including in her current role as senior vice president of strategic initiatives.

“It is an honor and privilege to do this work,” she says.

Boston University School of Law cultivates a commitment to community engagement—including on democratic issues such as voting rights and elections—and faculty regularly lend their expertise as thought leaders, advocates, and activists. For Goldstein, the 2016 election was a call to action, and she is not alone. After President Trump was elected that year, Rachael Jeck (’94) left her job as general counsel at a chain of veterinary hospitals to start a “second chapter,” joining the board of Fund Her, a PAC dedicated to electing women to local and state government positions. In 2021, she co-founded Register Her, a separate non-profit organization that works not just to register women in underserved communities to vote but to “activate” them, providing the resources, civic education, and support they need to exercise their vote successfully.

Political “moments” like these can have lasting consequences, for individuals and the country, says BU Law Professor Robert L. Tsai, who teaches a course on Election Law and Voting Rights Reform; has written extensively about political culture, democratic design, and popular sovereignty; and has advocated for major reforms to democratic processes in the United States. 

“The average person isn’t always paying attention,” Tsai says. “But there are these moments when people say, ‘What’s going on here?’ That’s the moment to press people.”

Looking to Make an Impact

The daughter of Vietnam War activists, Goldstein grew up in Los Angeles with an “antiauthoritarian perspective.” She studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and then decided to attend BU Law specifically for its top-ranked health law program.

“I think of my time at BU as intellectual boot camp,” she explains. “It was such a formative experience to really understand not just the process by which society operates—the law—but also the incredible power people have to shape those operating instructions.”

After graduating, Goldstein practiced health law at firms, advising clients on responsible research practices, informed consent, privacy, and conflicts of interest, among other issues. She was working toward her PhD in health policy when the 2016 election results came in. That’s when she and several other attorneys decided to create Sister District Project to match blue-state volunteers with progressive state-level candidates who needed support in “sister cities.”

“We were watching so many tens of millions of dollars go to races in California, which was clearly going to go blue anyway,” she remembers. “We wanted to find an area where we could have an outsized impact—and that was in our state legislatures.”

Today, Sister District works with campaigns and candidates to win elections and supports year-round community-based organizations building state-level power and state elected officials through peer-learning cohorts where can share best practices and strategies.

One of Goldstein’s current priorities is to help progressive state leaders take a stronger stand on regulatory issues in the wake of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a US Supreme Court decision from June that struck down the long-standing Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council standard, which had granted considerable deference to the authority of federal agencies.

“A whole slew of regulatory programs are up on the chopping block—everything from standards for products and drugs and food to air and water quality,” she says. “My legal practice and my PhD were in regulatory law and policy, so I’m doing a lot of work now to help states assess their ability to step in and regulate more muscularly.” 

Goldstein says she “knew nothing” about, and “had no vocabulary” for, electoral politics before she cofounded Sister District. While her background was in law and policy, she had never done more than occasionally volunteer on a political campaign.    

“Eight years later, here we are still doing this work,” she says. “And it’s even more important now than when we started.”

Mobilizing Women

Like Goldstein, Jeck had limited experience in politics before she joined the board of Fund Her and subsequently cofounded Register Her. She spent more than two decades working as an employment law attorney, including almost 18 years in-house at VCA Animal Hospitals. As a board member of Fund Her, she was making calls for Democratic candidates in 2020 when she had an “ah-ha moment.”

“People kept saying, ‘Stop calling me; I’m already going to vote,’” she remembers. “But our research was telling us that there were millions of eligible women who were not voting. I realized that political parties go for the low-hanging fruit—registered voters. But there are millions of women who are literally never, ever asked to vote.”

Register Her was launched in 2021 to change that. The organization hires fellows to enage in voter outreach with community-based organizations in key states across the country and provides them with monthly training and networking opportunities (in July, Malia Obama spoke to the group about civic engagement).

“We don’t need me—a middle-aged white woman sitting in suburban California going into Detroit or Dallas or Jackson or Raleigh and trying to tell women why they should want to vote,” she explains. “Research shows that people are much more likely to vote when they are asked to do so by people they know and trust.”

When Jeck cofounded Register Her, she agreed to lead the organization until her budget allowed her to hire “a really incredible person” to take her place.

“Right now, almost all of the [donations are] being funneled into programming,” she explains. “I take a nominal stipend; fortunately, I’m in a place where I can afford to do that.”

This year is Register Her’s second election cycle; Jeck’s goal was to have thirty fellows in five states. Instead, they have fifty fellows in six states. And, in the two weeks leading up to the election, they planned to send just under two million texts to all young women of color (ages 18-35) who are registered to vote in Arizona, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina Pennsylvania, and Texas.

“Every single woman who works for us as an organizer is paid,” she says. “This is critical work, and it deserves to be paid work.”

Reform Minded

To advance their goals of maximizing voter turnout among women and electing progressive candidates to state offices, respectively, Jeck and Goldstein are working within the political system as it currently exists. In recent years, Tsai has focused some of his efforts on exploring how to make that system better.

In 2021, he participated as a delegate in Democracy’s online constitutional convention experiment. The resulting document includes a proposed Article III with three sections on voting rights and federal elections to codify and protect an individual right to vote, something largely left to the states currently. The draft constitution calls for electing the president and vice president by a national popular vote using a ranked-choice method and would create a national election commission to govern federal elections, among other reforms. 

Tsai has also called for updating the Voting Rights Act to, among other things, prevent states and localities from purging voters within nine months of a federal election and conditioning federal funds on an agreement not to disenfranchise anyone for any crimes, or at least requiring automatic restoration of voting rights after release from prison. About 4.6 million citizens are currently disfranchised in this fashion.

“If we really want to be a modern democracy, that means that each individual has a right and responsibility to participate,” he says. “We should have formal processes that foster those rights and inclusiveness and responsibility. When we don’t have those conditions in place, it adds to the demoralization that a lot of people feel.”

Past and Future Inspiration

As former students in BU Law’s health law program, Goldstein and Jeck both point to Professor of Law Emerita Frances H. Miller as a role model and mentor.

“She was strong; she was tough,” Jeck says. “I really admired her and pushed myself to be better because I wanted to impress her.”

Goldstein says she still remembers something she learned in Miller’s introductory health law class.

“She said, ‘Don’t ever let anybody say something would be impossible,’” she recalls. “We shouldn’t be afraid to demand more and ask for more, including from our government. I’ve carried that with me always.”

Both Jeck and Goldstein say they are also inspired by the people they work with—the organizers on the ground and the state elected officials who, as Goldstein puts it, “toil in obscurity.”

Jeck says seeing someone change their perspective on voting helps too. “Sometimes someone will come up and say, ‘I didn’t think my vote counted, but you’ve opened my eyes; I’m definitely voting,’” she says. “That’s one more person participating.”