Angelo Ancheta joined Dēmos in January 2024 as a Senior Research and Policy Counsel. His work focuses on voting rights, language access, and state and local democratic reform.

Angelo has over three decades of experience working as a community-based lawyer, nonprofit manager,  academic, and researcher. He began his career as a legal services lawyer in California, focusing on immigration law and immigrant rights, and he was the executive director of the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus during the 1990s. Angelo later worked as the legal director of The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, where he focused on defending affirmative action in higher education, K-12 desegregation, and voting rights.

Angelo has also been a law professor and has taught equal protection and First Amendment law, as well as voting rights, the civil rights of Asian Americans, and clinical classes at UCLA, Harvard, NYU, and Santa Clara University. He has written extensively on civil rights law, including the books Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience and Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law.

Angelo’s government experience includes serving on the inaugural California Citizens Redistricting Commission. Angelo has also advised local governments and community groups on redistricting and voting rights compliance, and he was the attorney for the California Black Census and Redistricting Hub in the 2020 redistricting cycle.

Trained in both law and political science, his current research interests span several fields, including voting rights, redistricting, geographic information systems, and electoral modeling. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from UCLA and earned an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School and an M.A. in politics from the Claremont Graduate University.