Marc Erik Elias (born February 1, 1969) is an American elections attorney for the Democratic Party. He founded Democracy Docket, a website focused on voting rights and election litigation in the United States, in 2020. He left his position as a partner at Perkins Coie to start the Elias Law Group in 2021. According to The New York Times, "Elias has arguably done more than any single person outside government to shape the Democratic Party and the rules under which all campaigns and elections in the United States are conducted."
Elias served as general counsel for the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign. In 2020 and 2021, on behalf of the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee, Elias oversaw the state-by-state response to lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign contesting the 2020 presidential election results. Of the 64 cases, he won all but one minor case, which was later overturned in his favor. Elias was hired by the Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign to focus on potential recounts and post-election litigation.
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Early life and education
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Elias was raised in Suffern, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in government in 1990 from Hamilton College, at which he attended a class taught by Bernie Sanders. He then earned a master's degree in political science from Duke University and a Juris Doctor from Duke University School of Law.
Career
In 2004, Elias served as general counsel to John Kerry's presidential campaign.
Prior to creating the Elias Law Group in 2021, Elias was the head of the political law practice at Perkins Coie. He represented the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Governors Association, and a number of Democratic members of Congress. He has represented the leadership of the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate. In 2020, Elias's employer, Perkins Coie, received $9.6 million from the Hopewell Fund and $11.6 million from Priorities USA Action. Starting in 2020 Elias led a Hopewell Fund project called the Democracy Docket Legal Fund with the stated goal of supporting litigation to challenge Republican-backed voting restrictions enacted across the country.
He served as lead counsel for Senator Al Franken in the 2008 United States Senate election in Minnesota recount and contest, the longest recount and contest in American history. Elias has testified on campaign finance before committees in both houses of Congress and before the Federal Election Commission. Elias has worked on voting rights and redistricting lawsuits across the U.S.
In 2014, Elias advised Senator Harry Reid "on a provision that was tucked into a must-pass spending bill in 2014 that dramatically increased the amount of cash superrich donors could give to national party committees ... Republicans would later use the funds to pay Mr. Trump's legal fees while he was president, and have since used them to pay for ads."
In April 2015, Hillary Clinton engaged Elias as attorney of record and general counsel for her 2016 presidential campaign. According to The Washington Post, in April 2016, Elias hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign to create the research that resulted in the Steele dossier. Elias served as "the point person to fund opposition research that produced salacious – but ultimately largely debunked – claims about Mr. Trump's ties to Russia." Money from his clients, the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign, was used without their knowledge to pay for the research. On October 24, 2017, Perkins Coie released Fusion GPS from its client confidentiality obligation.
Targeting of Elias and the Elias Law Group by the Trump administration
On March 22, 2025, President Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum, "Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court", targeting lawyers and law firms more generally if they filed "frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation" against the administration, as judged by the attorney general. A variety of people in the legal profession condemned the memorandum as an attempt to intimidate firms so that they wouldn't take on clients who oppose government actions.
In the memorandum, Trump specifically mentioned the Marc Elias and the Elias Law Group LLP as being "deeply involved in the creation of a false 'dossier' by a foreign national designed to provide a fraudulent basis for Federal law enforcement to investigate a Presidential candidate in order to alter the outcome of the Presidential election" and that "Elias also intentionally sought to conceal the role of his client — failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — in the dossier." Marc Elias spoke openly in opposition to such actions by stating: "President Trump's goal is clear...[h]e wants lawyers and law firms to capitulate and cower until there is no one left to oppose his Administration in court...Elias Law Group will not be deterred from fighting for democracy in court...There will be no negotiation with this White House about the clients we represent or the lawsuits we bring on their behalf."
Criticism
Elias's tactics have been criticized by legal scholar Richard L. Hasen who has written a blog post outlining the differences in approaches to defending election law. Hasen and Elias had previously disagreed on legal tactics.
On March 12, 2021, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued sanctions on Elias and other Perkins Coie attorneys for "redundant and misleading" motions related to a case in which Elias and his legal team argued that the elimination of straight-ticket voting in Texas disproportionately affected minorities. In the ruling, the court stated that Elias and his team "did not notify the court that their latest motion to supplement the record filed on February 10, 2021, was nearly identical to the motion to supplement the record filed several months ago by the same attorneys, on September 29, 2020". After the ruling, Perkins Coie defended Elias's actions. In December 2021, Elias asked the full court to reconsider the panel's decision. His attorney Paul Clement claimed that the panel's action was unprecedented and Elias had made good-faith mistakes rather than engaged in egregious misconduct for which appellate courts typically impose sanctions. The court has broad authority to oversee the attorneys who appear before it. The motion was denied by the appeals court.
During a December 2021 episode of his "War Room" podcast, former Trump strategic advisor Steve Bannon said, "One thing about Marc Elias, he's pure evil, but, man, that brother is smart, tough. He's crazy, but he's a fighter, and I admire fighters."
