In June of 2025, around 100 people gathered at the National Association of Education’s Headquarters in Washington D.C. Jazz music played by a three-piece band filled the room. Guests milled about in nice dresses and suits while waitstaff served hors d’oeuvres on silver trays.
They were all there to celebrate Robert Brandon, an accomplished humanitarian with more than 50 years of public interest work under his belt—the last 20 of which as Founder, President, and CEO of Fair Elections Center.
A month later, Brandon passed the torch of President and CEO to Rebekah Caruthers, most recently executive vice president but had served as vice president for more than four years at the organization.
“Bob has spent decades contributing to what’s best in this country, we were determined to publicly celebrate this milestone in his career,” Caruthers said of the celebration.
Brandon has never cared about getting recognition for the work he has done. “Every once in a while,” he said, “somebody comes to me and says, ‘You made a big difference for me, or what I learned from you is really important,’ and that is gratifying but I just think I’m doing my job.”
What he does care about, simply put, is people.
Robert Brandon grew up in Usonia, New York, a cooperative neighborhood carved out of forest land 50 miles north of New York City dreamed up by a group of progressive individuals who asked Frank Lloyd Wright to help design the community that was developed in collaboration with a group of his students.
Brandon speaks fondly of his upbringing: children coming in and out of each other’s houses, parents taking care of whoever was at the dinner table that night.
Brandon’s parents took him to demonstrations against atomic weapons and for the expansion of civil rights from a very young age, teaching him about the world outside of their idyllic middle-class suburb. In 1959, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision had been met with resistance from southern segregationists, Brandon remembers talking to his parents about the Youth March for Integrated Schools. His father quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech from the march: “Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater Nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.”
MLK Jr. continued to inspire a young Bob Brandon. A few years later, only a few months after he got his driver’s license, Brandon convinced his parents to allow him to drive from New York to D.C. for the March on Washington.
“That was quite something,” he said. “Part of what was motivating was knowing that the march was organized not just by the leaders of the civil rights groups, but the labor unions, the faith organizations—a true multiracial coalition demanding equal rights for the country.”
These experiences all led him to one conclusion: He needed to be a lawyer.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, Brandon had several offers from law schools across the country. But to him, there was only ever one option.
“Washington was clearly the place I wanted to be,” he said.
Brandon attended George Washington University to study law, but he wasn’t going to find everything he needed to know in his textbooks. “I wasn’t going to come to Washington, and sit in class, and learn law,” he said. “I was going to be active.”
He served as a legal marshal for anti-Vietnam War demonstrators and organized law students from several schools across the country to form Law Students Against the War to lobby for a legislative end to the conflict. The organization helped train and brief thousands of lawyers to lobby members of Congress on two amendments: one that would limit the President’s authority to prosecute the war and the other that would cut off U.S. funding for the war. While the effort fell short that year, three years later, the Senate did vote to cut off funding.
In his second year, Brandon secured foundation funding to create the Task Force on Drug Abuse to expose the pharmaceutical industry over production and over-promotion of amphetamines and barbiturates. Drug salesmen were increasingly convincing doctors to prescribe barbiturates and amphetamines to remedy a variety of made up disorders, including curing “bored housewives syndrome.”
His group received national press exposing the problem during three Congressional hearings. When the group successfully petitioned the FDA to reclassify the drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, production dropped from 3 billion pills per year to a few hundred thousand.
After graduation, Brandon spent the next three decades achieving remarkable success on a variety of public policy issues, including tax reform, affordable energy, expanded healthcare access, environmental justice, college affordability, and internet access. He could have built a notable career as an expert and original thinker on any of these issues, but he moved on to tackle other injustices.
At the center of everything Brandon did, and continues to do, was a “help your neighbor” mentality that he learned at a young age in Usonia.“These were all things, for me,” he said, “that involved doing something about public policy, but doing it by organizing the people on the ground who were the most impacted.”
It’s not in his DNA to see an injustice and do nothing about it, because when Brandon sees a problem, he also envisions the solution to the problem. Then, he does what he needs to do to make that vision a shared reality.
“What I most admire about Bob is Bob doesn’t know the word ‘no,’” Caruthers, Fair Elections Center’s new President & CEO, said. “We’re constantly told the reason why we can’t do something. But Bob doesn’t hear that.”
His mentality, she said, is to keep moving forward through the roadblocks. This often means taking on several social issues at a time. “It’s kind of just how I operate,” he said, laughing. “It doesn’t make you bored!”
It was the 2000 Presidential Election that made Brandon see the problems with the country’s voting system. He didn’t know exactly how to fix them, so he did what he always did: He listened and learned from the people around him.
During the next presidential election cycle, he spent a lot of time talking to election lawyers and volunteered with the Election Protection Hotline to troubleshoot problems with voters on Election Day in real time. What he learned was that these problems could not be fixed in one day. These problems were systemic, and would take year-round attention to resolve.
So he got some funding and set up a task force of law students and former campaign organizers to continue to ask questions: He talked with nonprofit leaders, unions, grassroots groups and young voters. He asked where they got their information about voting, if they got it at all, and if they had access to experts who could give them legal advice about their voting rights.
The answer was overwhelmingly no. The community leaders voters trusted the most didn’t have reliable information to share with them.
Once Brandon determined what the problem was, he pulled together representatives from about 50 organizations that embraced his plan to tackle these issues. Soon after Brandon formed the Fair Elections Legal Network (FELN) in 2006.
FELN was unique in its vision and strategy immediately. Brandon and his small but hungry team made election law attorneys available year round and trained organizers across the country to provide accurate information about voting and elections to empower the American electorate and increase participation. They brought in groups that had previously been cast aside, like local election officials, recognizing that they were part of the solution, not the problem. Uniquely, FELN reached out to local election officials recognizing they were part of the solution not the problem.
Since then, the increased voter participation Brandon helped jumpstart has triggered a growing effort to suppress voting rights by those who want to silence those voices. Brandon and his organization have fought back every time.
In 2012, Fair Elections Legal Network launched its Campus Vote Project, with the goal of institutionalizing student democratic engagement on college campuses. “After a couple of years of helping students, training them, training their leadership,” Brandon said, “we realized that should be the role of these campuses, including community colleges and minority serving institutions, to educate their students to participate fully in our democracy.”
Mike Burns, Campus Vote Project’s National Director, has been with the organization since 2013. Initially doing part-time work while he finished law school, Burns was hired as a full-time staff attorney to track voting rights legislation in several states, but because of his background in youth political engagement, he took on some responsibility to broaden the reach and scope of Campus Vote Project as well.
One thing Brandon had tasked Burns with was to talk to other major players in the youth voting rights world, like Rock the Vote and the Department of Education. “By the time I chased all those people down,” he told me, “We had a good understanding of who was doing what, and most importantly, how much wasn’t getting done.”
In those early days, Burns recalled the team “just trying to do the next right thing, and figure it out as we went.” But looking back, he remarked, all the moves the organization made — with Bob at the wheel — created the path the program is on now.
The campus program is the largest of the three program areas for Fair Elections Center, working directly with more than 400 colleges and universities across the country where over 4 million students are enrolled, hiring 300 to 400 paid student Democracy Fellows every semester and employing 20 full-time, year-round staff members whose numbers increase during election years.
“It has not always been easy,” Burns said, “but it has always felt worth it.” And that, he said, is a testament to Brandon’s vision and leadership.
In 2016, a prototype of what would become known as Work Elections Project was launched. This solved another problem Brandon noticed within the electoral system: poll worker recruitment. More specifically, how complicated it was to apply to be a poll worker. Work Elections Project simplified that by creating an easy-to-navigate platform that provides all the information a person needs to become a poll worker in their area, including qualifications, applications, and who to contact for more information.
Poll workers have historically been retirees over 65, looking to be involved in their communities. The intent of Work Elections Project was to diversify the pool of poll workers so they more accurately reflected the voters they were serving.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, and election administrators across the country panicked. Who would run polling places when seniors were being told to stay inside? That’s when Brandon partnered with several funders and CBS/Viacom to launch Power the Polls. Using Work Elections Project’s API and data from more than 5,000 jurisdictions across the country, Power the Polls recruited more than 700,000 potential poll workers and avoided catastrophe on Election Day later that year.
Legal advocacy continued to be at the core of Brandon’s vision, making it unique among other organizations in the space. “That’s the great thing about this organization,” Brandon said. “We do help people vote with information and education, and we support them in the courts and in the legislature.”
Jon Sherman started working with Bob during the Fair Elections Legal Network days in 2013 as a Staff Attorney. Back then, litigation wasn’t as much of a priority. But as Sherman and others saw a need for it, Brandon, always open to new perspectives, allowed them to explore unique opportunities that presented themselves. “Bob, and the people he brought on, did not simply want to orbit around other groups or push stale ideas,” Sherman said during a speech at Brandon’s reception in June. “Because of Bob’s leadership, this organization wanted to engage in new approaches, to experiment.”
Sherman recalled the first case he litigated with the organization in 2015, when he challenged a voter ID law in Tennessee that expressly forbade students from using their university-issued IDs at the polls, while allowing other university IDs, like those given to faculty and staff.
They argued that the law violated the 26th amendment, which bars age discrimination in voting. Ultimately, Jon’s team lost the case, and the law still remains in effect in Tennessee today.
“Another boss would have seen the loss and said, ‘Okay, maybe we should just focus on policy.’ But that wasn’t Bob,” Sherman told me. “I think he saw the value and the potential, and good on him, because we’ve been able to rack up a number of wins across the country and in unique cases.”
Sherman said voting rights lawyers have often dismissed the creative strategies the organization utilizes, which he thinks made his work all the more important.
Just a year after the Tennessee case, the litigation team sued the state of Louisiana over a 142-year-old law that required proof of citizenship from naturalized citizens. They received pushback from other advocates, but that didn’t stop them.
“We won,” Sherman said, smiling. “They repealed the law.”
Sherman is now the organization’s Litigation Director, and has witnessed many legal victories since then. In his tenure at the organization, the litigation and policy team has grown exponentially, and expanded their reach to protect voting rights in states across the country and at the federal level.
By 2017, Fair Elections Legal Network had grown beyond its initial vision and capacity, and Brandon filed for the organization to become its own 501(c)(3) nonprofit, renamed Fair Elections Center.
The organization now employs more than 40 staff members and continues to lead innovation on voting rights advancement across its three main programmatic areas of litigation and policy advocacy, poll worker recruitment, and student engagement.
It’s a success story that couldn’t have happened without Robert Brandon. “Fair Elections Center is the ‘House that Bob Built,” Caruthers said in a press release marking the leadership transition. “I am very fortunate to have been by his side, learning from him, over the last few years that we have been running Fair Elections Center together.”
What is next for Brandon? Retirement, at least in the traditional sense — summers spent golfing, winters spent somewhere warm — isn’t an option. He’ll spend the next year providing support for Caruthers and the organization in an advisory capacity, and after that he’ll decide what problem he wants to help solve next.
“Whatever the next thing is for me,” he remarked to his reception guests, “I’m going to continue my ‘career of humanity’ and fighting for our democracy.”