Larry Garber is an election policy consultant and activist, and a former United States foreign policy official. He spent his career with government institutions such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and non-government organizations with close ties to the American foreign policy apparatus, such as the National Democratic Institute. He is now a board member with the left-of-center election advocacy group Election Reformers Network (ERN). ¹

Education and Career

Larry Garber received his bachelor’s degree in political science from Queens College in London. He went on to attend Columbia University for his master’s degree in international affairs and his law doctorate. Garber started his career in the legal field, spending two years as a clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and nearly five years as the legal director of an international human rights organization, as well as a short stint at a private law firm. In 1988, he became an associate with the National Democratic Institute. Five years later, he went to work for USAID, where he would spend more than a decade. In 2004, he left the agency to take over the New Israel Fund, but in 2009, he returned to USAID. Since then, he has worked as a visiting instructor at the National Defense University, a military higher education institution; a private consultant; and an adjunct instructor at George Washington University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Arizona State University. ²

Garber authored a set of guidelines for observing and reporting on elections in countries where the United States and its global partners have a vested interest in the outcome, and his work took him to countries such as Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone. ³ Garber’s private work on elections, meanwhile, included providing consulting services to some of the world’s most influential international institutions, such as the United Nations and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as the Organization of American States. Garber also spent a portion of his career focused on the Middle East. While he spent five years as the USAID mission director for the West Bank and Gaza at USAID, he later became the chief executive officer of the left-of-center New Israel Fund. ⁴

As of April 2022, Garber sits on the board of the Election Reformers Network. ⁵ The ERN is an ostensibly nonpartisan pressure group pushing for changes to electoral procedures. At the same time, the network touts its “proud” membership in the Bridge Alliance, a coalition of more than one hundred activist organizations which promote policies for conducting elections that would benefit left-of-center candidates and voting demographics. ⁶ He is also a senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. ⁷

Political Views

Larry Garber maintains that the 2020 United States presidential election was conducted with few to no irregularities, placing the primary responsibility for any instability on outgoing president Donald Trump, who asserted that cases of electoral fraud may have occurred. At the same time, Garber suggested that disruptions could have occurred: in an article written shortly after the election, Garber claimed that “armed militias” could have conspired to “intimidate voters,” or that the media would not “have the patience to wait for all ballots to be counted.” However, Garber concluded that the performance of “key United States institutions” such as election authorities, appellate courts, and the media during the election had been a model for other nations. ⁸

Garber supports the United States government and American-aligned institutions intervening in the political process of the Palestinian territories: in an April 2021 article for The Hill, he described the stance of the Biden administration on the upcoming Palestinian elections as “ambivalent,”’ and called it a “mistake.” However, he also dismissed the idea of intervening directly and attempting to postpone the elections to prevent a potential win by Hamas, an Islamist political and militant faction opposed to Israel’s existence. He also argued that while a Hamas victory would complicate efforts to shape the Palestinian political sphere, it would also provide a justification for the United States to disengage from the process until a more favorable situation emerged. ⁹

1. “Leadership.” Election Reformers Network. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://electionreformers.org/leadership/
2. Larry Garber. LinkedIn. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://www.linkedin.com/in/larry-garber-572954b/
3. “Leadership.” Election Reformers Network. Accessed April 14, 2022.

   https://electionreformers.org/leadership/

4. “Larry Garber.” Center for Strategic & International Studies. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://www.csis.org/people/larry-garber
5. “Leadership.” Election Reformers Network. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://electionreformers.org/leadership/
6. Election Reformers Network. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://electionreformers.org/
7. “Larry Garber.” Center for Strategic & International Studies. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://www.csis.org/people/larry-garber
8. Larry Garber. “U.S. Avoids Nightmare Election Scenarios as Institutions Prove More than Adequate.” Medium. November 10, 2022. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://medium.com/the-carter-center/u-s-avoids-nightmare-election-scenarios-as-institutions-prove-more-than-adequate-9863d8cc022
9. Larry Garber. “The US should help Palestinians vote regardless of potential outcomes.” The Hill. April 15, 2021. Accessed April 14, 2022. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/548383-the-us-should-help-palestinians-vote-regardless-of-potential-outcomes/