Mary Ann Liebert, Inc

May Ann Liebert co-sponsored the 2018 conference for Election Science, Reform, and Administration (ESRA), an annual forum that invites mostly left-wing academics, tech developers, and think tank staffers to share papers on alleged challenges that local election offices face. ^{3 4}

Background

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. is a global media company and publishing house founded in 1980. As of 2025, Mary Ann Liebert was a subsidiary of Sage Publishing. ¹

Its stated mission is to advance “global innovation to support a healthy, sustainable future.” The company is expressly committed to the climate policies outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ^{1 2}

Activities

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. publishes peer-reviewed research and facilitates the distribution of content pertaining to advances in the fields of biotechnology, life sciences, clinical medicine, and government policies pertaining to public health. Its catalog is chiefly marketed to specialists, whether researchers or clinicians, and aims to help bring about scientific and medical breakthroughs. ¹

Mary Ann Liebert is known for establishing the AIDS Research & Human Retroviruses journal in 1983. More recently, the company has caught attention for its forays into the science of gene editing, launching the CRISPR Journal in 2018. ²

In 2018, the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted the conference on Election Science, Reform, and Administration (ESRA), an annual forum that invites mostly left-of-center academics, tech developers, and think tank staffers to share papers on alleged challenges that local election offices face. Mary Ann Liebert co-sponsored the event along with the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cambridge University Press, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Democracy Fund. ESRA speakers tend to focus on center-left topics such as “misinformation” about the election system, methods to combat voters’ distrust of election officials, vote-by-mail, racism, gerrymandering, and ranked-choice voting experiments. ^{3 4}

Presentations at the 2019 conference covered topics such as “legal and administrative” obstacles to greater voter turnout, “registration innovation,” efforts to increase voter turnout, the “differential effects of purging inactive registered voters,” election security, the alleged “disproportionate burden” that “strict voter identification laws” place on “minority turnout,” election day registration, and ranked-choice voting. ⁴