MBHS alum Will Wilder fights to protect voting rights during COVID-19

If Will Wilder has his way, everyone in the country will be able to cast their ballot in November’s election.

That’s the thrust of what Wilder, a Mountain Brook High School graduate who recently graduated from Columbia Law School, is doing through his work at New York’s Brennan Center for Justice. He’s the recipient of the Brennan Center’s prestigious Herbert and Nell Singer Social Justice Fellowship.

“Right now, my team is focused on protecting the right to vote during COVID-19,” said Wilder, who earned his undergraduate degree in political science from Washington University in St. Louis. “We are using litigation and other forms of advocacy to make sure everyeligible voter is able to safely cast their ballot and have it counted this November, whether that be in-person or by mail. We are doing everything we can to protect the right to vote and make sure election officials are prepared to run an election during this truly unprecedented national crisis.”

The quest for social justice was instilled in Wilder at an early age by his parents, Chris and Beth Wilder, the latter of whom was executive director of the Literacy Council of Central Alabama.

“My family was always committed to service,” Wilder said. “I spent a lot of summer days growing up either helping my mom’s nonprofit deliver books to schools around Birmingham or driving with her to Montgomery to advocate about different education issues.”

Wilder’s commitment to service was cemented by work he did in Hale County.

“One of the most significant parts of my personal social justice education was the summers I spent in high school and college working at Sawyerville Day Camp, the Episcopal Church’s youth program in the Black Belt,” he said. “The program had a strong commitment to racial justice, and being on the Sawyerville leadership team was really the first serious step I took toward a career in social justice advocacy.”

And it didn’t stop there. Wilder began his senior year at Washington University in St.Louis just after the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson.

“That year as a whole definitely had a strong impact on my worldview and career plans,” Wilder said. “Law school had always been an idea in the back of my mind, but I started seriously considering it my senior year of college during Ferguson. As I got more involved with the protests, I saw a lot of connections to my work back in Alabama and thought about how the law had contributed to all of it. People had always told me I would be a good lawyer, and so I started seriously thinking about civil rights law as a career.”

After graduating from college, Wilder spent a year in St. Louis as part of the Coro Fellowship, a one-year public affairs program, then spent a year working on the Senate campaign of Jason Kander and as the director of a voting rights organization. Last summer, he worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery.

Now, he’s using all of that experience to fight for voting rights restoration for people with criminal convictions.

“Felony disenfranchisement is one of the largest sources of voter suppression in our country,” Wilder said. “In many states, the people most affected by the criminal justice system have no democratic voice in changing it. My team is using litigation and other direct advocacy to try and change that.”