LeRoy Collins Institute at FSU

In 2025, the Institute’s leadership participated in the Election Science, Reform, and Administration (ESRA) conference, which was hosted that year by FSU. ESRA is 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. ^{4 5}

Background

The LeRoy Collins Institute is a public policy think tank housed at Florida State University (FSU). It focuses on the state of Florida, analyzing political trends within the state and seeking “creative solutions” to its problems. The Institute is named after Thomas LeRoy Collins, a Democratic politician who served as the 33rd Governor of Florida (D). Collins was notable as the first governor from the South to promote desegregation. ^{1 2}

Activities

The LeRoy Collins Institute funds research into Florida politics and public policy. Some of its listed issue areas include “school choice,” “sustainability,” “climate gentrification,” and Florida’s “pension and financing.” The Institute proudly reports that its studies have been referenced in “almost every major daily paper” in the state. ⁶

A broad overview of news articles mentioning the LeRoy Collins Institute indicates that the think tank is primarily cited by left-wing writers advancing left-of-center narratives. ³

FSU held the 2025 conference for Election Science, Reform, and Administration (ESRA), an annual forum that invites mostly left-of-center academics, technology developers, and think tank staffers to share papers on alleged challenges that local election offices face. Speakers tend to focus on left-coded 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. ^{4 5}

The host committee of the 2025 ESRA conference included Lonna Atkeson, the director of the LeRoy Collins Institute; Brooke Beazer, the deputy director of the LeRoy Collins Institute as well as the founder and former leader of the “inclusive education” advocacy group TGN; Tonja Guilford, the chief of staff for COSSPP and assistant to dean Tim Chapin; and Press Jackson, the office administrator of FSU’s political science department and close associate of the LeRoy Collins Institute. ^{5 1}

The 2025 conference featured discussions from Texas Tech University professor Joseph Coll, who researches “the differential effect of election policies on voter fraud beliefs and voter confidence between Black and white Americans” and “the racial threat foundations of support for voter qualifications”; FSU postdoctoral researcher Yimeng Li, who researches “voting by mail, provisional ballots, voter confidence, and voting technology”; and University of Missouri-St. Louis political science and gender studies professor Anita Manion, who researches “the impact of policy on issues of equity, particularly in areas of elections, educational policy, and local government.” Another member on the program committee was Mark Earley, a member of the executive committees of two federal bodies—the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) and the Local Leadership Council of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—as well as a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Task Force on Elections and a representative of the Election Center for the U.S. Postal Service Mailers’ Technical Advisory Committee. ⁵

Affiliations

As of 2025, the LeRoy Collins Institute was listed as an affiliate of MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL), an election and polling statistics center housed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that claims to apply “scientific principles” to the study of how elections are administered in the United States and aims to “improve the democratic experience” for American voters. MEDSL’s research areas tend to favor a center-left narrative of election reform, with subjects such as “mail-in balloting,” “same-day registration,” and “redistricting.” In 2017, MEDSL co-sponsored the first Election Science, Reform, and Administration (ESRA) conference. ^{7 8 9}

Leadership

The LeRoy Collins Institute is administered by a board of directors comprised of former politicians, policymakers, academics, and private citizens. As of 2025, John Marks III was the chair of the board, and Lonna Atkeson was serving as the director. ²