The Remarkable Stories of Democracy Reform Victories in 2018

This podcast is part of the Democracy group. Welcome to Another Way, the podcast produced by Equal Citizens, a nonpartisan pro democracy organization founded by Lawrence Lessig. This is Adam Icahn, the organization's campaigns manager. Before we begin the episode, as always, please consider supporting us on Patreon. With your support, we can keep this podcast going, especially in these difficult times. To sign up, go to patreon.com/citizens that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/citizens okay, now to today's episode. I'm recording this introduction right after the election meltdown in Georgia on June 9th. This election was plagued by malfunctioning election machines and ridiculously long lines. It was, needless to say, a disaster. And to be perfectly honest, watching this election unfold made me really sad because running an election during a pandemic is terribly difficult. We all recognize that. But with months to prepare, an outcome like this was plainly inexcusable. With proper reform and preparation, we know that we can hold a safe and successful election. But that's not what happened in Georgia. There are going to be many more sad moments for our democracy in the months ahead. So I wanted this episode to be particularly uplifting, not in a naive way, but in a way that acknowledges the journey to be had, while also recognizing the tremendous progress that we've made in the past few years. I want this episode to remind us of what can happen when Americans come together to fight for reform. So I could think of no better person to interview than David Daly, who has appeared on this podcast a few times before and who just authored a wonderful book book on the movement for reform. It's called How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. And as we'll talk about in this episode, Dave actually embeds with reform movements across the country in 2018, chronicling both the frustrations of those campaigns, but also the successes and the joy and sense of patriotism that these citizens have in their quest to to reinvigorate American democracy. I really do suggest everyone who's looking

for a little bit of hope in

these difficult times to check out this book. Dave also wrote the best selling book Rat why youy Vote Doesn't Count. It's probably the definitive book on the modern gerrymander. It also inspired the new documentary Slay the Dragon, which I highly recommend and that we'll talk about a bit in this episode. Dave's work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, the Guardian, and numerous other publications. He was formerly the editor in chief at Salon and is currently a senior fellow at FairVote. And so with that, we'll begin the episode.

So, Dave, thanks so much for joining us again.

Hey, Adam.

So since we last spoke to you

on this podcast, a lot has happened, both in the world, for better or mostly worse, but also for you. First and foremost, your amazing 2016 book, Rat Fucked was actually turned into a movie. The movie, the documentary is called Slay the Dragon and it's available now to stream. So anything you want to say to our listeners about this movie and why it's, you know, pretty phenomenal, if I do say so myself.

You know, it's a documentary about gerrymandering that will make you cry and cheer. And it sounds ridiculous to say that, but the filmmakers just did such a beautiful job in sort of capturing the emotional arc, I think, of the victory in Michigan by Katie Fahey and voters, not politicians, to enact an independent commission. And they also followed the incredibly dramatic story of the Wisconsin case at the Supreme Court. And I think it just caught the human side of gerrymandering. They tell the history and the background really, really well and the story of Redmap and kind of how the Republicans enacted all of this and in 2010 and 2011. But I think what the movie does dramatically is show how when maps are rigged to tilt one side, it ends up in policy outcomes that hurt people and that people have very little control over unless they do what citizens have done around the country and band into these amazing sort of trans partisan coalitions and go to war with their own representatives and win back fair maps. And that's the story of the movie.

Was it somewhat surreal, Dave, to see your work become such a well produced documentary? I mean, this is really, you know, Slay the Dragon is honestly one of the sleekest documentaries I've seen on democracy reform, which I don't think I could have ever imagined that these issues that, you know, you and I think about every single day would become so cinematically presented.

You know, they've long called me the Brad Pitt of the gerrymandering movement. So, you know, I felt pretty comfortable in a, you know, big screen out. I think it worked pretty well. You know, I am ready for my close up. So.

Okay. The other big David Daley news is that you have a new book that just came out, unrigged, and now this book is significantly more optimistic and solutions oriented than your last Rat Fucked, which is all about again, as we talked about the plot to Gerrymander America and this book Unrigged is all about Americans coming together and actually winning democracy reforms. So can you talk a bit about how this book came together and why you moved from diagnosing the problems in our democracy to focusing on the broader movement to win reform? Sure.

I mean, I had written a book about how democracies die, and the bookstores were suddenly, you know, filled with them. And it just didn't seem productive to continue to add to that pile, especially not when I looked around the country and saw that people were taking matters into their own hands. And that, to me, felt like a really exciting story. When you write about gerrymandering and redistricting, sometimes you feel like you've got this kind of dark rain cloud over your head. And I'd go into a lot of rooms after the 2016 election where people would invite me to talk about redistricting and kind of what had happened and how that had. Had. Had helped lead to Trump. And you would feel like you were sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. You know, there's these wonderful people, and they're fired up to take action. And you would sort of show up and just be like, well, this is going to be really, really hard. And you could feel the air just coming out of the room. And I was looking for a way to end my talks on an upbeat note, you know, and I wanted to inspire people and to find an answer to that question of, okay, but what can we do about it? And suddenly there were these really interesting answers being formed, and they're being. And it was action that was being taken by regular people. You know, I mean, it's Katie Fahey in Michigan posting to Facebook that she wants to do something about redistricting in Michigan and launching a movement. It's a bunch of Idaho natives coming back to the state and spending 1400 bucks on an RV and driving around the state collecting signatures, determined to do something about Medicaid expansion. It's individuals in North Dakota stepping up to win driver's licenses and to actually make the IDs for Native Americans when courts and legislatures there really work to suppress the Native vote. In a really important state in Florida, where Desmond Mead and Neil Vals launch an amazing moral movement to win back voting rights for the 1.4 million Floridians who had lost them due to a felony conviction in the past that they'd served their time for and deserved to get their civic voice back, there were all these really amazing movements underway, and I wanted to get out and be with the people who had logged off of Twitter and stopped throwing things at cable news and actually gotten out there and said, I'm going to work and make this better.

And so how did you actually find these stories, Dave? I mean, now you've popularized them. We know about the Amendment 4 fight. There's been a lot of coverage. But how did you decide which of these stories to tell? And you actually embedded with many of them, right?

I did. It was really thrilling. I wanted a mix of stories from around the country, you know, different parts of the nation, and I wanted to chronicle sort of lots of different angles of the fight back. You know, I didn't want this just to be about redistricting. I wanted it to be about the many, many ways that Americans were finding to contribute. What I hope this book provides is a roadmap for people who can look at it and find in some of these stories a role for themselves and their own talents in some sort of movement in their state or nation that could be needed. Because all of these fights are completely different, and they are happening all around the nation in different ways. And I think what binds them together is it's people finding ways to fit the skills that they have into a political movement. And, you know, I mean, it might be the mathematicians in North Carolina who helped unravel the secrets of the gerrymandered maps in that state, or it might be a woodworker in Michigan who wanted to do something about redistricting and was able to make the clipboards that the canvassers took from door to door. You know, it might be, you know, someone who has an understanding of GIS systems and can help, you know, map addresses for, you know, tribal land in North Dakota. Or it might just be folks in Alabama who are willing to go door to door, a bus stop to a barber shop, in search of folks who had a felony conviction in their past who were given their voting rights back by the state, but that the state wouldn't lift a finger to help. And the Alabama Voting Rights Project committed to trying to walk up to as many people as they could in the state and see if they were one of those 70,000 people, and if so, sign them up. There's lots of ways to contribute, depending on what you're interested in and good at.

So I want to take listeners through a few of my favorite stories from your book. Longtime listeners of Another Way will be familiar with some of the campaigns that you write about, such as, you said gerrymandering reform in Michigan, or you also talk about ranked choice voting in Maine. So I won't go over them today. And if any listeners don't know what I'm talking about, I really encourage you to listen to our interviews with Katie Fahey of Michigan and Kyle Bailey of Maine. Those are really thoughtful conversations about those amazing movements, successful movements for reform. But I want to talk, Dave, first and foremost, about felon disenfranchisement. And I'm wondering if you can kind of give a little bit more of the story to the two campaigns, these narratives about how citizens were able to broaden enfranchisement in the South. So, you know, I'm wondering if you can kind of give our listeners a little bit of a feel for these amazing reform efforts from 2018. On the topic of felon disenfranchisement, and it might be worth, since we haven't talked about it too much on this podcast, to explain a little bit about what felon disenfranchisement is, where it comes from, and why it's so bad.

Sure, it's a really important topic, and it's just such an insidious growth on democracy. Felon disenfranchisement essentially takes the civic voice away from those who have sort of prison time. And in many Southern states, this dates back to the days after the Civil War. The states that wanted to get back into the Union afterwards, they had to ratify the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which effectively guaranteed black citizenship and voting rights. And they didn't want to do that because in many of those states, it would have created black majorities. And Alabama, Florida, elsewhere, they were not particularly interested in expanding the franchise. So what they did was they ratified those amendments, but then they adopted new state constitutions that often in very explicit ways and sometimes in more subtle ones, effectively enshrined white supremacy in those states. And if you go back and look at the constitutional conventions in those states, they talk about it very clearly, about what their aims were. And the words white supremacy come up again and again in Alabama and Florida elsewhere, you know, back in the 1870s. And what they did was in these these constitutions effectively said, if you have a felony conviction, then you cannot vote. And then the states passed, you know, black codes that defined felonies to be the kinds of crimes that were most likely to be committed by poor and economically desperate blacks in the days after the Civil War. So minor theft. There's a story of a man named Cuffy Washington in Ocala, Florida, who stole a couple of oranges and as a result was convicted of a felony and lost his voting rights Forever. And this was a really effective way of keeping the, the vote out of black hands in Florida and Alabama and other, in other states across the south for a long, long time. And even after the passage of the Voting Rights act in the 1960s, you know, 100 years after the Civil War, a black voter registration in many counties in Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, is, is far lagging behind white registration numbers. And then you add the war on drugs and sort of the imprisonment that you see of black Americans in the 1970s, the 1980s, into the 90s after the crime bill, and you begin to see how this can introduce massive racial inequity, not only in the criminal justice system, but it also bleeds into voting rights. And so by 2018 in Florida, for example, you had 1.7 million Floridians who had lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction. That was 10% of the adult population in Florida, nearly 20% of the adult black population. And it's a stunning number of people. There were only a handful of states as of that time that were as punitive as Florida when it came to this. And Florida was the worst in the country as far as the number of people who had lost their rights, that the only way to get them back was to go through a governor's commission and effectively beg for them before the governor and a couple of other state officials. And those processes were long and hard and would often take a dozen years or more, and they very rarely resulted in success. So what happened in Florida is you had a movement led by lots of criminal justice groups and voting rights over time, but it doesn't catch fire until a man named Desmond Mead takes over the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. And Desmond's got this amazing story. He had been a felon himself. He had served time on, on drug and weapons charges, and he'd gotten out of jail and was homeless and depressed and stood in front of the railroad tracks in Miami one day and was determined to just throw himself in front of the next train, which amazingly just doesn't come. And so he literally walks himself across the tracks and is walking several blocks in a daze and finds himself outside a drug treatment center. He goes in, he gets his life back in order. He gets his undergraduate degree, he gets a law degree, but of course, the one thing he can never get back is his right to vote. So he becomes the executive director of this Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. They form this amazing sort of multi racial and ideological a coalition. So it is, if you want to win in Florida, a constitutional amendment, you've Got to do it with 60% of the vote. It's not easy to do in Florida. So you have got to team up with Republicans and independents and all, you know, so the, the coalition that they build is, is black and white. It's left and right. It's Trump deplorables on motorcycles and radical criminal justice reformers, and it's everyday Floridians who simply knew somebody who had been caught up in the criminal justice system in their youth in the past and was a different person now. It was their neighbor who deserved a chance to have their voting rights back. And they won this huge victory in 2018 with 64% of the vote. The New York Times calls it the biggest victory for voting rights since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It's really a transformative and signature win. And I think it sets up well, it sets up two things and we can get into both of those. I've been talking too long, but it sets up on one hand, I think, a real understanding that these are questions of fairness and it opens up the possibility for more work on rights restoration for felons. But, you know, it also shows how, you know, state legislatures that have been gerrymandered oftentimes will work to undermine the victories by reformers, even those that are passed with 64% of the vote.

And very quickly, Dave, can you, can you just give for our listeners a sense of just how powerful and inspiring of a Speaker Desmond Mead is? Because I think that's one of the things that you can't really know. You don't really understand what a remarkable human being he is until you hear him speak in person.

He's magnetic and electrifying and commands a room with this deep passion and moral authority. He has a glow, you know, he's one of those human beings who you meet and they glow with some sort of real exceptionalism. He's a magnificent leader.

So it's really hard to overstate how significant that Florida victory was for the movement to end felon disenfranchisement. But you do tell a lesser known story, as you alluded to earlier in this episode, about Alabama. Can you give us a quick synopsis of that before we move on to a different solutions oriented campaign on many of the other reforms that you talk about?

A quick synopsis that means, Dave, you talk too long about Florida, which I did.

Well deserved.

It was a big question you asked. Yes, the fight in Alabama I think is fascinating because Alabama, in their Constitution set up something called moral turpitude. And they said that A felony that is committed with moral turpitude involves the forfeiture of voting rights, and one that does not. You're still allowed to vote. What is moral turpitude? They left that up to largely white voting boards to decide. And that, of course, introduced amazing inequities. Sometimes people would be convicted of the same crime, but the whites would keep their voting rights and the blacks would lose them. Sometimes a felony like drug possession would be a crime of moral turpitude. But when the Alabama speaker of the House is convicted of massive bribery charges, that somehow was not moral turpitude and he was able to keep his voting rights. The Supreme Court of the United States back in the 1980s, they said, this is bad, and you can't do this. So the Alabama legislature tiptoed exactly up to the line that they could, and they held on to moral turpitude for as long as they could until it was clear that they were going to lose another court case, at which point in time they disassembled moral turpitude. They just didn't tell anybody. So there were 70,000 people in the state who were newly eligible to vote, but the secretary of state there, John Merrill, wouldn't lift a finger to help register them. He wouldn't even create and make available the forms for folks to apply for reinstatement. The state wouldn't do anything to work with parole boards or anything and sort of tell people that they've gotten their rights back. And at a time when, you know, across North Carolina, across Texas, that there are people in jail for voting accidentally if they were not able to, that's a pretty chilling thing. People aren't going to mess around with that. So the Alabama Voting Rights Project, which was, you know, a joint group led by the Campaign Legal center and the Southern Poverty Law center, decided to go out person by person and try to find those 70,000 people. They created the forms. They stood outside bus stations and libraries and went door to door trying to register those voters. I joined them, and it was. It was absolutely amazing.

Can you recount the story that you tell at the very beginning of your book from Alabama? Because I think that oftentimes with these discussions about, you know, felon disenfranchisement or really any of these, you know, disenfranchisement stories, we often lose the people who are adversely affected. And you tell such a sad story to start your book again, this book that is profoundly optimistic, but the story of harm is really difficult to grasp. So can you quickly tell our listeners about the real harm that this felon disenfranchisement law causes.

I'll never forget it. You know, we were at the bus station in Birmingham, 6am on a, on a summer morning and you know, it's folks going to work. And they trained me as far as how to do this because people don't want to necessarily admit that they've got a felon conviction to someone who walks up to them at the bus stop, especially if it's a middle aged white guy like me. And so, you know, I approached this woman, asked her if she was registered to vote, kind of waves me away, as they had suggested people might, because no one wants to admit that. And you know, I said, well, we're just out explaining to people that there's been a change in the law and you know, folks who've, you know, got a felony conviction in the past are, are actually able now to register to vote. And you know, suddenly that kind of got her attention and she was, you know, heading off to work, I would say, you know, mid to late 30s woman. And she had been convicted of marijuana possession as a 17 year old. She'd gotten arrested for, you know, smoking weed as a high school senior. And that one decision as a 17 year old had cost her her voting rights for her entire life. It had been, you know, more than 18 years and she had never voted. She lost her right to vote before she was ever able to use it. And we signed her up that morning, you know, right there, and there were tears in both of our eyes. So, I mean, it's a sad story in some ways, but it had just this, it was profoundly moving. And she looked at me and said, you know, I will be a lifelong voter. She said, all I ever wanted to do was vote for Obama once and I wasn't able to do it. That's what happens, you know, I mean, someone's 17 years old, they get arrested for smoking pot. Something that, you know, is legal, you know, in, in many, many states, but it cost her, a young black woman in the south, her voting rights forever. And she thought she might never get them back. And I think that helps put in context the harm here and who laws like this affect and entrap. And these aren't, you know, these laws were put into effect in the days after the Civil War and they're still entrapping people today. They were put into effect with racist intent, it's clear. And they're still trapping people today. We need to fix this. It's a moral urgency and it really

is just a remarkable story of these democracy reformers just going person to person and you tell the story of just how daunting that is. But they just don't give up. And maybe they won't hit their goals of tens of thousands of registered, but every person that they help register is returning a certain level of political and social and just basic dignity to those people.

So.

Okay, Dave, let's talk about Utah. Now, there are two stories from Utah, a state that many people don't really think of as necessarily a hotspot for democracy reformers. But you tell two stories, one about gerrymandering and the other one, you know, about voting rights for Native American communities. And especially the latter is incredibly, incredibly important as we are fighting to expand vote by mail options during this coronavirus crisis. So fire away. What did you find in Utah quickly

on gerrymandering in Utah? I think what's really important to keep in mind there is that gerrymandering reform wins in Utah, a one party Republican state. It's close, but it wins. And I think that's a sign that if redistricting can win in Utah, it can win anywhere in the country. And that Republican voters understand how bad an idea and how corrosive it is for a democracy just as well as Democrats do with regard to Native Americans who vote by mail. There's a couple of stories that were just shocking and inspiring all at once. The southernmost county in Utah is San Juan County. It is Navajo land. It's almost entirely Navajo, Navajo land. And it's massive. I mean, this is a county the size of New Jersey and it lacks a New Jersey turnpike. You know, the roads are dusty and windy and you are driving across desert and there is nothing there except the most beautiful rock formations you've ever seen that for miles and miles and miles. Up at the very top of the county, there are three, our three white towns. And down at the bottom, you know, is largely populated by Navajo, diffusely kind of spread out across that land. And for years, the three white towns at the top had had gerrymandered the county commission in such a way so that even though they were less than half of the people, they held all of the, all of the power when it came to the county commission. And after really heroic court fights over decades, they were finally able to win, you know, redrawn districts that in 2018 finally created a majority Navajo council in this majority Navajo county that will allow some of the resources to actually be spent outside of those white towns and to actually help people where it's needed most. The Schools and roads and economic development. It was profoundly unfair for the last 120 years. But they also, in order to make that work, had to overcome an additional challenge, which is that San Juan county became a vote by mail county. And that creates really interesting challenges on tribal land. It does not create many challenges up in, you know, up in Blanding and Monticello and those white towns up in the northern part of the county, because those are, you know, regular, you know, small towns with a downtown and, you know, mail delivery at everybody's house and, you know, a big old shiny post office in the middle of it all, the Navajo land, you know, again, it's the size of New Jersey. And they have three post offices. And when you go and visit those post offices, they are, you know, essentially a few PO Boxes tucked in the back of a gas station. And you walk up and you see them that, you know, mail has been thrown on the ground and you don't know what's being delivered, what's not being delivered. In many cases, people live an hour, an hour and a half away from that post office, and they might go get the mail once a month. So if you're doing vote by mail, as we're Talking about in 2020, you have these populations on tribal land, for example, that if you have to say, mail in a request for an absentee ballot and then wait for the ballot to come, if you're only going to get your mail once a month, and if mail service is that unreliable, or if. If you are a tribal elder who can't make that trip along these dusty roads. And states have passed, quote, unquote, ballot harvesting laws that make it a felony for you to give your ballot to a family member or a neighbor to drop off, you are effectively disenfranchising them. So we absolutely have to be thinking about how we expand vote by mail, but we also have to be doing that while we keep in mind that vote by mail is not a realistic option for people and it could effectively disenfranchise many of them if we aren't also thinking about other options for those folks.

And again, that's just such an important point to emphasize here, which is that, of course, vote by mail is incredibly important. I mean, in the past, I've interviewed Phil Keesling. I've vote at home. You know, we talked to, on a previous episode, once the coronavirus crisis started, we talked to Rick Hassan, Professor Rick Hassan. You know, we talked about the importance of expanding no excuse absentee balloting. You know, this is critically important. But, you know, Dave, I do think your point is really well taken and it's one that you and I have talked a lot about off air because, you know, we don't often think about, you know, the ways in which vote by mail could be disenfranchising in Utah because we don't often think of, you know, the real rural tribal land of Utah. That's not something that, you know, as you and I record this podcast both in Massachusetts, you know, that's not something necessarily always on our radar. And so it's a critical story to tell because, you know, any reforms that we pass nationwide or in any state, we really have to focus on best practices. And in a lot of respects, the devil's in the details that we really have to make sure that everybody can vote and everyone has access to the reforms that we pass. So I really do appreciate you telling that story. Okay, let's go back to something, or let's go back to Florida, because I want you to tell a story of youth voters in Florida because I think that's a really exciting example of, you know, that this isn't just this democracy movement, isn't just, you know, the League of Women Voters, not anything against the League of Women Voters, but that, you know, there really is a new generation of activists that care about the franchise and are willing to fight for their fellow young Americans to make sure that they have access to the polls.

Yeah, devil is in the details, as you just said. Right? The devil is often in the details. And what had happened in Florida is that some state and local officials decided to interpret the law in such a way as to say that you could not have an early voting center on a college campus. And in college towns and cities across Florida, that's where most of the of the population lives and works. So it would kind of make sense to allow them to vote on campus. That is, if you were especially interested in having them vote at all. And what you would have in places like Gainesville is early voting centers that were set up a couple of miles off of campus. And there were some wonderful reformers there who would run buses up to the polls. But it was hard to get college kids to take a, you know, wait for the bus and then take a 20 minute bus trip up and then 20 minutes back. It was very inconvenient and it effectively put barriers in front of college students and anyone who worked on that campus that just made it hard enough to vote so that many people wouldn't and in such a way that you could have made it easier, right? I mean, it would be common sense to have an early voting location on a campus. And so they filed a lawsuit and they said, that's not what this law says, it's not what the law means, and we ought to be able to have an early voting center in our student union. The courts agreed and they won. In 2018, students in Florida were able to vote on campus. The devil being in the details. Again, as soon as that ruling went against the state earlier this year, they tightened up the law and they said, okay, you can have an early voting center any place where there is easy accessible and non permitted parking. Right. So that's the one thing usually you don't have on a college campus where you have to really control limited parking spaces. But it's usually okay to do that because most people live nearby and are on foot. So that's just another way in which reformers can win and the politicians come right back and force you to fight again.

Right, exactly. But this idea of disenfranchising college students is just so widespread. I mean, Dave, I think about when I was in college, you know, not too, too long ago, but you know, what they did is we used to have polling locations, you know, within walking distance. And I think on my last year they moved the polling location so that you had to be shuttled and you know, I was helping to lead get out the vote effort and you know, it was very difficult to get people to, to be willing to hop in a van when they have, you know, classes to go to or homework. I mean, you know, getting students to turn out in college is very difficult anyway and it's made far, far more difficult when the polling locations are not easily accessible. We weren't even asking for one on college campus. We just wanted one within walking distance so that really, you know, you can see, if you're ever on these college campuses, you can see the way, you know, making it harder to vote really does depress turnout. So it's a critical point that you raised, Dave, and I'm really glad that that story is in the book because it's one that I don't think, you know, got enough news coverage when, when it happened.

You know, it's not only in Florida, this is an issue for students on college campuses in New Hampshire, in, in Texas, in Iowa, in Michigan. This is a really effective way for Republican legislators to make it harder for what they imagine are young, probably Democratic leaning constituencies on campus to vote. It has reared its head in lots of ways, forcing you to register your car in the state which is effectively a giant poll tax on a 19 year old or trying to force people to register at their parents address and not their college address, which then might make them travel back across the state on election day. There's lots of ways that a student voting rights are under assault and it's critically important.

Let's turn to a funnier story from your book. And it's funny because it's the story of one of the chief peddlers of voter fraud. The myth of voter fraud really gets embarrassed in court because he can't prove his case. So can you tell the story of Kris Kobach and the way in which he was absolutely made a fool in federal court?

It's a beautiful thing, you know, I mean, Kobach is kind of the, you know, leading keystone cop of the myth of voter fraud. And he's been peddling this nonsense for years and very effectively and has, you know, was the secretary of state in Kansas and has introduced this, you know, crosscheck program that has been, you know, a tool of using voter roll purges as a means of voter oppression. And he has pushed this, you know, I think, really dangerous myth that we have voter fraud in this nation. When all of the facts and studies show that voter fraud is not only increase, is not only incredibly rare, it's, it's practically non existent, but that the solutions that Kobach and his, his pals put forth for voter fraud, this problem that we don't have, actually do disenfranchise people. So his problems, the Kobox as solutions to a problem we don't have, creates worst problems on their own. And he had claimed that there was all kinds of voter fraud happening in Kansas and he gets sued by the ACLU who said, well, if you say that there's all this voter fraud and that that's the reason why you have to make it so difficult to vote, why don't you approve it and prove it? Not on Fox News or in your column on Breitbart, but you know, prove it under cross examination in a federal court before a federal judge. And you know, Kobach is supremely overconfident, a real believer in his own intelligence. And he decides he's going to try this case himself. He lacks any of the evidence he says he has. He's unable to provide it. He is routinely lectured by the judge in this case on, you know, matters of basics, trial procedure. He ends up not only losing the case, losing the case badly. Seeing his signature of voter fraud provisions in Kansas that he had hoped would go national wiped away completely, but he's sanctioned by the judge and told to go back for remedial legal education. It was just such a thorough de. Pantsing of a clown.

I love that story so much, and it definitely, you know, you don't take, you know, glee at someone else's embarrassment. But I think in this case, for all the damage Kobach has done to our democracy, you can certainly read this chapter and, you know, feel good because, you know, he has been one of the chief peddlers of this. Of this lie and this lie of voter fraud. You know, it's. It's a. It's. It's something we know not to be true. But every time it gets said by the president, by someone like Kobach, it does legitimize the issue for people who, you know, haven't gone through the record, haven't gone through the evidence to show that there is no widespread voter fraud. But if you don't know that, it seems like an open question. It's severely damaging to our democracy. And so that really was a major win, and it wasn't done by, you know, grassroots activists fighting for a ballot initiative, but it was through the courts, and the ACLU did a remarkable job there. So one more story here, Dave, and then I want to go a little bit into some of the stuff that's happened post publishing of the book, but I want you to tell the kind of quirky story that, again, it's just not known across the United States of a group of mathematicians that have dedicated themselves to ending gerrymandering.

Yeah, it's very true. You know, and they're. There are these, you know, brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists and experts in geometry. One of the. The brightest is Moon Duchin right there at Tufts, who is just a powerhouse. And I think what they understood was that. What they understood was that their skills were uniquely matched to gerrymandering because it was a question of districts and shapes. Right. And they had mathematical approaches that would allow courts to see through lines that had been drawn to lock in partisan advantage. And you see this evidence being used in gerrymandering trials around the country in really, really effective ways. And all of these approaches are a little bit different, and they're all complicated. And somebody who couldn't get out of high school calculus, like me, probably shouldn't be the person explaining them. But what they all have in common is that they're able to draw tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of millions of random sample maps, and then you are able to compare the partisan bias in the map adopted by the politicians to this other sample of, you know, sometimes hundreds of millions and billions of neutral maps. And what you see time and time again is that the maps that are adopted by the politicians are sometimes the most biased of all of them. Meaning that if you did any possible neutral configuration of lines, you would come up with something better and more fair than what politicians came up with. And it has been really useful to show judges this. Judges like proof and they don't like taking, you know, map making power away from the political process. And judges certainly don't want to be drawing lines themselves. They're not usually interested in that kind of responsibility. But oftentimes in a gerrymandering trial, what you have is the party on in the minority side complaining that the maps aren't fair. The party in charge saying, well, we're able to do this. We have to draw a line somewhere, right? So this is where we put them. And a judge who doesn't really want to pick sides in a partisan fight, and what these map makers are able to do is to say, no, no, no, there really is a clear and neutral way of adjudicating this. You can look at these sample maps and you can see where the political maps fall in the process. And it has worked in cases in North Carolina and in Pennsylvania as being crucial towards new maps. It was working at the federal court level. You had maps in Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan that had been struck down as being unconstitutional based largely on this evidence. And it would have been perfect for Justice Kennedy. This really was the evidence that he was looking for in order to establish a national gerrymandering standard. Unfortunately, Justice Kennedy resigned one year before these cases reached the court. He's replaced by a more conservative justice in Brett KAVANAUGH. And in 2019, the Supreme Court closes the door on partisan gerrymandering cases at the federal level. But this work is still going to be very, very important at the statewide level. And these mathematicians are heroes of democracy.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the stories that you tell are just really, really quite inspiring. And I think that, you know, as I close the loop on having you articulate some of these stories, you know, I will just say that, you know, what really comes across in your work is, you know, just how, how ordinary. And that's not, you know, a derogatory word. How, how much you see yourself in, you know, the people who are leading these fights for democracy. These are not democracy superheroes by birth. They're just citizens who decided to stand up and use their talents, whatever they may be, whatever those talents are, for the purpose of reinvigorating our democracy, to push it to where it's never been. And I think that really comes out. And I have to say, Dave, not to be too laudatory, I have been accused of that before. You know, when reading parts of your book, I really did tear up because these are such powerful stories. And I know that when you were there and, you know, actually, I'm sure when you were writing it, I'm sure this was a very emotional piece of journalism that you. You engaged in, because these really are remarkably inspiring stories. And I know that one of the things that, you know, you and I have talked about a lot is there are so many different ways that you can kind of be beat into pessimism, given the. The tremendous number of assaults on voting rights and, you know, the egregiously partisan gerrymandered maps and, you know, all the money in politics. And it very difficult to maintain any sense of optimism in this difficult time. But your stories very much reveal the case for, if not optimism, at least sustained belief in the possibility of change.

I think that's beautifully put. You know, I think I went out in search of hope, and I found it in all of these Americans who are working so hard to fight for change, even when the path against them was difficult and uphill. And all the experts said this can't be done. Why are you bothering? Why are you trying to bring Medicaid expansion to Idaho? Why are you trying to fix redistricting in Michigan? Folks haven't been able to do that for years. And you, Katie Fahey, you think you can do it? Why are you trying to fix felon disenfranchisement in Florida? This has been the case for 140 years. It can't be changed. And all of these folks not only kept going, but they won. And I just think that's incredibly inspiring. And, you know, to be able to ride along and join these people in the course of their fights was thrilling and an absolute honor.

So, Dave, one of the most difficult things after publishing a book is seeing all of the amazing or depressing news that would have been perfect to put into the book. And of course, I'm thinking that there are both negative and positive things that have happened since you published. So I'm wondering if you can first talk a little bit about all of the backlash from politicians in response to these reform efforts that won.

Sure. Listen, politicians don't give up their gerrymandered districts or their rigged advantages easily. And we certainly saw that after 2018. You saw legislatures in Florida essentially add a poll tax on top of the felon re enfranchisement campaign, even though nearly two thirds of the state voted to allow those folks back on the voting rolls. You saw work requirements added on to Medicaid expansion in Idaho, even though that's not what the people of Idaho asked for. When that initiative won with more than 60% of the vote, you had politicians in Michigan go after the redistricting commission attempting to definance the Secretary of State's office and inhibit the ability to pay for it and then go after it in court. Just last week in Missouri, we saw how legislators there have essentially tried to completely gut the clean Missouri initiative on campaign finance and redistricting and bringing it back to deep control there by partisans and insiders. These fights are long and hard. Right. And the other side isn't going to give up easily. If winning one election, if passing one law was enough to fix everything. Right. We could have cured all this with the Voting Rights act. Right, in 1965. It's not as if these debates stopped after that. These debates didn't stop with the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. These debates are as long and have been with us for as long as we've been a country, and I think they're likely to continue to be with us. What we have to have is full on citizen engagement around questions of democracy. That's when we have a chance to win. It's not that we're going to win back democracy with any one vote or any one victory. It has to be a sustained, all hands on deck effort. I mean, Dr. Martin Luther King talked about the arc of moral justice being long but bending towards justice. And I think what we have all learned is that the arc doesn't bend towards justice on its own. It bends when we all grab onto it and pull it towards justice. And that's what happened in 2018. It's not that there were individual victories in Idaho or Florida or Alabama or North Dakota. It's that Americans of all parties and backgrounds and ages and races put their hands on the ark and started pulling in the right way. And as long as that continues, we're going to be okay.

And I think one of the real promising examples of that is what happened in Virginia recently, which was not included in your book because it happened, you know, a couple months ago, in fact. Right. Right before the COVID 19 crisis really hit. So can you talk a little bit about Virginia and the amazing victory that seemed Almost like it was going to fail. And how it, how it succeeded.

Yeah, you will have independent redistricting in Virginia in 2021, just as long as it passes the final step and is ratified by voters this fall. And you know, it's a long process towards reform there, but it won over, over two sessions. One session controlled by Republicans, another session controlled by Democrats. And just when it looked like Democrats might scuttle that reform, they claimed that it was not enough reform. The problem with that being you were at a time new maps had to be drawn in 2021. Getting a constitutional amendment is a two year process. And the perfect couldn't be the enemy of the, of the good if you didn't want to have politicians in charge of drawing these maps. And what you had was Democrats and Republicans coming together there and agreeing that it was more important to start the process towards reform and to follow up on what they'd promised. And the legislature in Virginia essentially handed over more control over redistricting than any legislature has voluntarily surrendered at any time. We're going to have to keep working and watching and ensuring that there's enabling legislation that's fair and maybe there's legislative fixes that can come in future years and make this even better, but you're going to have citizens in the room when these lines are drawn in 2021, and that's a good thing.

And it took a lot of citizen effort to do it. You know, I remember, you know, I think we were hanging out a couple months ago and when it, when we got word of it passing and Brian Cannon, who was leading the effort, gave you a call and it was just so wonderful to see the, you know, just the hear the glee of victory from, you know, folks who have been on the ground fighting, you know, not for self interest, but for democracy. And it really was kind of an exhilarating moment. And I know for you, you were grinning very widely because it was a moment of celebration. And in some respects, I think it's so easy to feel pessimistic. And I know I keep hammering this point, but when you or I are in the room, when victory arrives, there's nothing like it. There really is nothing like it.

Brian and One Virginia 2020 have just done amazing organizing work for years. You know, the, the effort that they've done. Brian's got this, a pickup truck, and he has probably put, you know, tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousand miles driving around that state, going to libraries and town halls and coffee shops and just talking to people every night of the week about. About gerrymandering and to win the kind of victory he did and his group did and all those volunteers. It's amazing, you know, and it's inspiring to see real people stand up, make real change and win.

And one of the things, right, is that I don't really think it's, you know, it's not fully captured as conversation much more so when you read your book is that these really are grassroots efforts. I mean, this is like the, you know, the dull and dry work and hard work of winning politics is, you know, grabbing a clipboard and going door to door, getting in an RV and driving the entire state, you know, doing all of these really quite often menial tasks. But these are the stepping stones to get into that moment on election night where you're winning, for example, in Florida or Michigan by a vast majority of votes. You don't. You don't get there. You don't get to election night without the years of blood, sweat and tears that, you know, each of these remarkable democracy warriors, you know, engaged in.

And that's why the final moments of Slay the Dragon are so magical, because you have followed Katie and her amazing team through this fight. You follow them from the rest areas and the football games where they collected signatures, through the court battles when the chamber of commerce tried to kick them off the ballot. And you see them on election night win and the shock and the awe of being regular people who amended the state's constitution. I mean, yeah, it's a documentary about gerrymandering, but if there's a dry eye in the house, I haven't seen it yet.

That would be a really good place to end this conversation. But I want to dig a bit, maybe return us back to the hard work ahead, because we're in a crisis right now, obviously, we're all where most of us are stuck at home trying to flatten the curve and not get sick and spread the virus. So what are your thoughts right now about this movement for democracy reform in the age of COVID This feels like an obligatory question to ask of any guest on this program. What are you thinking? Are there any reform efforts that you're watching closely during this pandemic? Are there any that were derailed that you, you know, are sad about? And I guess also, you know, if you had the freedom to go in bed again, where. Where would you go in bed? Where would you go? Look, what's where. Where are you looking towards in terms of the next frontier of this fight? Even during COVID it's a Great question.

I would like to embed at the White House and somehow find a way to explain to the President that voter fraud does not exist, that what he's talking about is a myth, and that vote by mail is deeply nonpartisan and will be just as useful for rural voters in red states as it is for urban voters in blue states. And the senior citizens who often vote Republican shouldn't have to stand in line and risk a virus if they want to come out and vote for him. Here's what I think. I think that the amazing victories that were won in 2018 were won because voting and democracy issues have been able to ride above the massive polarization within the American public. You don't win felon voting rights at 64% in Florida in a year in which Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott are elected unless you've got everybody on board. You don't win anything in Missouri at 62% unless everyone's coming on board. You don't win redistricting in Ohio at 70% in Michigan, at 60% in Colorado, at above 70% in Utah. Right. You don't win Medicaid expansion in Idaho without Republicans believing that this is the right thing to do. So these ballot initiatives and these voting rights questions have real appeal across the board because Americans believe in fairness. They understand that gerrymandering is cheating. They don't like cheating, regardless of whether it's politicians or the Houston Astros or anybody else. And when you look at the numbers right now, the numbers in favor of additional vote by mail options are through the roof. So let's keep it there. I mean, I think that is my hope. And it's. It's where my optimism is, but also where my fear is. I fear that these issues are made partisan in a really dangerous way over the next 170 days before the election. But I still have faith that Americans understand that their vote is their voice and that voting in the middle of a pandemic is not going to be the same as it has been, but that we can do this if we plan effectively and we still have time left in front of us to do that. It's not easy. You can't flip a switch and transition. There's going to be a lot of hiccups. And as you said, the devil is in the details. The devil is in how we. How we pay for it, how we make people apply or not apply for ballots, whether we're able to put postage and make all these ballots and all these ballot applications prepaid, whether we are able to change laws and states and ensure that ballots can begin to be opened and counted and processed by administrators in the days ahead of an election. Because a 70% vote by mail election is a lot longer and harder to count than a 10% vote by mail election. Can we do the kind of training of voters that's necessary to make this work? Can we have good ballot design? Can we be certain that all the people who have to vote in person are able to. To. Can we train the media and the Wolf Blitzers of the world that Election Night in America might be a great show, but it might not have an ending that night. You know, NBC might not be able to, you know, color code all of the states on the ice outside Rockefeller center that night. It might take a little bit longer to count, but that the process will be fair and it will be underway. But there's a. There's a lot of work we have to do to, you know, make all this happen. And that's what has to get done over the weeks and months ahead.

And there are people working every day to ensure that we have a free and fair election in November. And, you know, this is. The folks on the front lines here are really. Should really be celebrated in this country because the work they're doing is incredibly important, obviously. And Dave, you know, there may also be, you know, we don't know yet, but there may also be some ballot initiatives again, and it won't be quite the same effort as in 2018. There won't be as many. I think this year was going to, you know, be a year where there were a lot of really critical reforms on the ballot, you know, just like in the previous couple cycles. But because ballot initiatives will require certain numbers of signatures to get it on the ballot, many of those efforts have been disrupted because of COVID But, you know, there is still life in some of them. I mean, you know, here in Massachusetts, the movement for ranked choice voting is, you know, might well get on the ballot, get this critical reform on the ballot, you know, and the question really is in some of these places, are they able to collect, you know, signatures for these petitions to get reforms on the ballot electronically? And there are some states where it seems like you can. Some states where it's been blocked in courts. But, you know, that. That is certainly something to watch as an almost sequel to Unrigged in the Time of a Pandemic. I guess Dave, is the next title for a book that probably won't be

published, Unrigged in the Time of a Pandemic. I'm not ready to write another book again, but don't make me do that one.

So, Dave, I want to end by talking about an article that you just published in the New York Times. And I truly think it may be one of the most important op eds that I've read of yours. And I don't say that lightly because you have certainly published a large number of critical, critical op eds and reporting articles. And, you know, in 2010, as you outline in your book, Rat Fucked, Karl Rove essentially published an open letter in the Wall Street Journal, and in it he announced his plan, the Republican plan to rig the maps once redistricting started. And no one really paid attention then. And it was all to our detriment, because what happened was a decade of rigged maps. You just published an op ed outlining what you see as the new playbook for the gerrymander of the next decade. And we're all obligated, I think, to take it seriously and to do what we can, starting now, to prevent it, because we do not want another decade of rigged maps. And you have outlined exactly what the playbook is going to be. And so it really becomes up to us whether or not we choose to act and choose to do something to prevent it. So can you outline a little bit about what this article chronicled and why it is so imperative that we listen?

Sure. Thank you. What Rove did in 2010 in the Wall Street Journal is he outlined REDMAP, which was the Republican redistricting strategy that involved winning back state legislative chambers in 2010 with an eye to having every seat at the table and dominating redistricting in all of the swing states, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, et cetera, and drawing maps that Republicans couldn't lose on for the next decade. And that is what they did. I mean, Democrats haven't won back a state legislative chamber in any of those states this decade, even in years when they win hundreds of thousands of more votes. So it was a very effective plan. We are still living with the consequences. Republicans are devious and they're strategic. And what they're thinking about in 2021 is not how to flip state legislative chambers. They already control most of them. It's Democrats that have to think about sort of how to flip the chambers back in their directions and win back seats at the table in those states. What the Republicans are trying to do is, and I think Missouri, the legislation that's been introduced there that would undo the initiative that won in 2018 that we talked about, I think that's really A dress rehearsal for what you're going to see rolled out in state legislatures nationwide. Some of the things that it would do. It would make it harder for citizens to gain standing, to file lawsuits and to challenge a map. They've learned from what happened in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and they're going to make it harder for citizens to sue. They're trying to tie the hands of judges in advance. Those judges in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and elsewhere have overturned entire maps based on partisan gerrymandering evidence. And what this legislation would do is say all that a judge could do is order the fixing of the individual districts. They would not have the power to order an entire new map. So most of the advantages that are etched inside of there would be able to continue. And I think most disturbing is it would allow this shift, shift from total population to citizen voting age population. And this is technical, so give me a second to sort of explain what I mean here. We have long used a total population as the standard for drawing state legislative districts in this country. Districts have to be equal in size, and we have essentially divided the number of seats by the population. There's some minor deviation allowed, but essentially that is the way you draw districts. What Republicans have understood over the course of this decade, and they've done some really important studies on this, Thomas Hoffler, the Republican redistricting mastermind, did one of them in Texas. And they find that if they use citizen voting age population instead, so you don't count everybody, you only count American citizens over the age of 18. When drawing these districts, what happens is that the population becomes older, it becomes whiter, it becomes more rural, it becomes more conservative, and it becomes, in Hoefler's words, more likely to elect Republicans. If you make this shift and it's perfectly legal, it could be done by statute in most of these states. It would have the ability in a place like Texas to roll back a couple decades of demographic change. And in a state like Missouri, it could really lock in a deep unfairness into the maps. Last fall, I obtained a secret video, I'm sorry, a secret audio. A recording of an ALEC conference in Texas in which Republican election experts were urging state legislators to do exactly that, to use a citizen voting age population. And as we all know, what happens at ALEC conferences very quickly gets rolled out as model legislation in state legislatures, you know, nationwide, in a real cookie cutter variety. So I think this is what we have to be looking for. And I worry sometimes that Democrats are so intent and they have to be on unraveling the 2010 REDMAP strategy that they're vulnerable to missing what Republicans are working on for 2020. It's not going to be enough to simply try to win last decade's war if the other side has developed entirely new weapons.

And so, Dave, it's my real Hope that in 2022 we don't have to ask you for Rat Fuck 2, the story, the secret story, or not so secret story of the gerrymander of 2021.

I am hoping that there is not going to have to be a Rat Fucked two Electric Boogaloo. But you know, if I have to write it, Dirty Dancing has a sequel. You know, I hope it's better than Cars two. I mean, that was kind of a lousy sequel. I mean, it's Godfather 3 was bad, right?

So, Dave, any final words of optimism? Because I feel like over the past couple years you've turned into an optimistic person here. So I want you to conclude on some optimistic thoughts about the next six months.

We are in a battle for the future of our democracy, and citizens need to have their hands on that, on that arc, and they need to bend it towards justice. I am confident that we all understand the stakes. And when you travel the country and go to Idaho and Utah and Alabama and Florida and Maine and work alongside all of these amazing volunteers and activists, you really get a sense of the passion and the purpose with which folks are out there intent on reclaiming our democracy.

Thanks so much for joining us, Dave.

My pleasure, Adam. You guys are awesome. Thank you for all you do.

This has been another episode of Another Way. Join us next time.