Reyna Walters-Morgan has spent a lifetime fighting for voting rights.
Reyna Walters-Morgan is a Brooklyn-born and North Carolina-raised voting rights advocate and proud alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Howard University School of Law. Reyna started her voting rights advocacy work in college at Chapel Hill, where she was the first woman of color and the second woman ever elected Student Body President. As a student, she focused on voter registration and initiated efforts that eventually led to the first satellite polling location within walking distance of campus.
After graduating from Chapel Hill, she served as the Director of Student Outreach for North Carolinians for Educational Opportunity, a bond referendum campaign designed to educate students and the public on the proposed higher education bonds. The referendum passed, which provided $3.1 billion in funds for higher education capital facilities—the largest in the United States at that time.
Following her time at Howard Law, Reyna sought roles where she could be of service to others. From volunteering on campaigns and doing voter protection, to working on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign as a Regional Voter Protection Director in the battleground state of Ohio, she threw herself into any opportunity to have a positive impact on people’s lives.
After the 2016 campaign, she focused on protecting the right to vote by starting her law practice, Walters-Morgan Law PLLC, and managing the 2018 Election Protection program for North Carolina’s nonprofit organizations.
In 2019, Reyna earned her dream job when she took a position as the Director of Civic Engagement and Voter Protection at the Democratic National Committee. As a member of the Senior Leadership Team, Reyna was responsible for developing and implementing a national voting rights and voter protection plan, which included working on the national litigation strategy, working with states to build programs, and utilizing data to develop best practices.
Reyna’s tenure at the DNC has been described as “transformative,” where she revived a floundering department and turned the national voter protection operation into a public utility. When she first arrived at the DNC, the voter protection and assistance hotline was just a line that routed straight to her cellphone—but over almost five years, she worked tirelessly to change the perspective of voter protection programs from purely Election Day operations to year-round organizing and advocacy programs designed to proactively address and resolve issues that limited voter access, run by thousands of volunteers.
Some of her successes as the Civic Engagement and Voter Protection Director included modernizing national voter assistance hotline operations, allowing her team and state-based partners to help hundreds of thousands of voters, helping to develop and execute the two largest voter protection programs in history: the 2020 presidential voter protection program and 2022 midterm voter protection program. She was also instrumental in launching the Voter Registration and Purge Tracker, a nationally recognized data tool utilized to notify and attempt to re-register over 335,000 inactive and purged voters in 2020.
Since then, Reyna has continued to take on work that pushes for voting to be fair and equitable. She knows that change doesn’t happen overnight but leaves every position she occupies in a better position than it was before her so that the next person can continue to make effective change. Outside of her voting rights work, Reyna is an avid traveler, with 48 countries (and counting) under her belt.
