Constitution society, its a pleasure to welcome you to live stream presentation with the author david daley, in conversation with Chris Novoselic. I want to an when were in our home, that institution stands on the unseated traditional territory of the team, the due due duwamish tribe. Were thrilled to present an event virtually in the midst of the concerns surrounding Public Health. Taken hall is a Community Focused organization and a place where we can share and sustain ideas when we cant get a tort in person and i want to thank chris and david for appearing to make that possible. Town hall is pursuing options for producing more Virtual Events and many past talks are available in video of podcast form. So stay in touch with us. Unfortunately tonights broadcast is does not feature closed captioning services about captions will be available when the video is uploaded to the you tube page. That will be win the next 2436 hours. 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Theyll have copies for sale that will feature signed book plates and theyre the best place to purchase your book. If i had been able to get to the green room in time i would in the exactly how long theyre intending to speak tonight but typically we ask for something in the 30 to 40 minute range after followed by a moderated and we answer session. So, well just say theyll talk for as long as it takes. Our moderator will select questions from those submitted in the ask a question field at the bottom of your screen you can vote on which questions the speakers will answer first by clubbing the arrow. We cannot guarantee they can address every question. Well try to get to as men as possible and as we like to say in person, keep your questions concise and in the form of question. Town halls work is married possible by the support of sponsors, Real Networks foundation. This long when i deliver this thing in person but its intermable so thank you for suffering with me now. So our civic series sport Real Networks foundation, the true brown folks, kuow and the wincoat foundation and of course it is outboundship, 6,000 who coop the place strong so i want to thank the members and encourage those who carry about town hall and the mission to join us. Okay, after all another. That david daley is the author of rat fuck. Can i say that on the radio, the creditor. Rat fuck the true to behind the secret plan to steal americas academicracy, reforming gerrymandering. The former editor in chief of at the former ceo and publisher of the connecticut news project. A Digital Media fellow and the gradey school of journalism and his work neaped the new yorker, the washington post, the guardian, the atlantic, Rolling Stone and as a correspondent on cnn and npr. He helped identify milk felt that the deep throat source for Chris Novoselic is a political and a Founding Member of anywhere van in and play nirvana. He wrote a weekly column for the Seattle Weekly and board share of fairboat. The first book, of grunge and government, lets fix this broken democracy. His book is the subject of tonights timely talk, joan my in welcoming david daley and chris thank you. It is thanks for tuning in to the town hall. I hope everybody is happy and sane and healthy during this pandemic, and just even do the best you and can we should make it through this. And so, dave daley here, my colleague, i met through fair vote, he has new book called unrigged, how americans are fighting back to save our democracy. And so tonights conversation is going to be about gerrymandering, where political insiders, political elites, they draw district lines for Single Member districts to benefit themselves and their Political Parties. You know the Horror Stories and dave can touch on that. And so were going to talk but gerrymandering and were also going to propose some solutions, namely proportional representation, a type of voting. So, daves new book is out, so ill turn it over to you and so lets hear it, dave. Thanks. I am really sorry not to be out there with everyone tonight. Again, i also hope youre all safe and sane. I know we all sand together with you doctors and nurses and the folks in the Grocery Stores and journalists and all the essential workers who are so carefully doing their jobs for all the rest of us. Thank you for everyone at town hall and third place for selling books tonight, the american constitutional society, our friends at fair vote washington. Everybody could use your help and support. These amazing book stores and terrific activist groups so get involved during these difficult days. We could also i think use some optimism and some hope, and this new book, unrigged began with a quest for hope. Like nexted in introduction i writ this book book called rat fuck about gerrymandering and has to have a memorable title and first laid out the highly effective republican strategy in 2010 to win the state legislatures in competitive states like ohio, North Carolina, michigan, wisconsin, pennsylvania, just ahead of the redistricting era of 2011. We draw all the lines again as soon as the census numbers arrive to try to account for population equality in all these states. Then they use the Single Member districts and they redrew them with the powerful new map making software, these amazing new data sets that really made it possible to go up and down the streets and essentially choose their own voters, and to kind of hot wire our democracy itself. At this point its an amazing number, this 59 million americans, almost one in five of us, that live in a state where one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that won fewer votes in 2018. One in five. And then on november 8, 2016, you had the of those gerrymandered states, each of whiched a made it moyer difficult for people to vote in really specific ways. Earlier in the decade and hand donald trump the Electoral College and americans woke touch this deeply divided country, closely divided country, but all the political power was sitting on one side in washington and the supreme court, 70 of state legislatures nationwide, was all concentrated on one side. And its not a partisan argument. Its a bad for Representative Democracy when a majority of voters are consistently unable to win a majority of seats. And you had this toxic combination of Single Member districts, gerrymandering, kind of closely followed by these voter speakings lawsuits that had been passed by the unaccountable legislatures and it really tied our democracy into this profoundly unfair double knot and had established this kind of nearly unbeatable minority rule in competitive places, and it was kind of hard to see a solution for this crisis that i thought had contributed so deeply to the extremism and the sense of hopelessness that plagued so much of our politics. I feel look i had the dark rain cloud over my head, and i wanted to get rid of that, and one day i sow a Facebook Post by a young michigan woman named katy and katy as an amazing story, elect night 2016 she leaves her job as working at a recycling nonprofit in grand rapids, michigan, puts on her best red pant suit and flies to new york with a Golden Ticket for Hillary Clintons victory party. The night did no go as katy planned. And gets home and is getting ready to go to work the next morning and she is already sort of terrified of what thanksgiving will bring in her house, bernie supporters, trump supporters, theres disappoint hilary backer and she is just imagining mashed potatoes and turkey and gravy flying across the table. So the takes social media and writes, i want to take on gerrymandering in michigan if you want to do that as well, join me here and she adds a miley face emoji at the end of this. And gerrymandering in michigan has severed the connection between the ballot box and the popular will in michigan and yet no one had been able to do anything about it for the entire decade. That post by a 27yearold, pioneers this winning redistricting revolution in a state that no one thought could happen. That post ends. Marshaling 4,000 volunteers. Together they go out and collect 430,000 signatures. They make it on the ballot. The first time in michigan that this has happened without having to go out and pay collectors to good out and do it. Then they won in november 2018. They beat back a Koch Brothers money and devos money and the u. S. Chamber of commerce money set against them. 62 of the state agreed with them. Theyll have an independent commission drawing the lines in michigan in 2021. So it wasnt long after that, that i met desmond mead who had taken on the really difficult task of returning Voting Rights to 1. 7 million former felons in florida who had essentially lost their civic voice forever along with a conviction even after they serve their time. It was just this cruel vestige of the jim crow south, and it ensnared 10 of all the adults in the state, 25 of all the black men in the state. And mead new that pain well bus he was one of them, and a drug addiction and a deep depression had led to a felony weapons charge, and one afternoon, after his release, he is homeless, still struggling with drugs, he stands before the Railway Tracks in miami and he is just waiting for the next train to come. Except the train that afternoon for whatever reason doesnt arrive, and he walks across the tracks instead, its as if he says to me like he was guided by some kind of power and he actually finds himself outside a drug treatment center. Checks him in turns his life around, returns to college, aways a law degree but doesnt matter because the one thing you cant do in florida, no matter what, is earn back the right to vote. So he becomes the director of the florida rights restoration commission. Builds this amazing coalition that unites black and white, democrats and republicans, excons and Second Chance believing churchgoers. Tattooed trump loving deplorables and radical criminal justice reformers into a mighty moral coalition. This was fund by the Koch Brothers and the aclu at the same time, and on election day 2018, even as florida elects a republican governor, republican u. S. Senator, and two really close races, a big majority, super majority, 64 of the vote, back restoring these Voting Rights in a constitutional amendment. All of these people had stood up and voted for fairness. And i was really inspired by these stories. Just the way they sort of triumphed over this sense of despair in our politics, and i was pretty sure we didnt need another book about how democracy dies and what i want ted do is set out and join these quiet revolutionaries who seem to me to be reinvigorating the civic fabric of at the time that we needed it most, it and didnt matter if these barrier were high or stout. They were willing to tilt at them and take them on. So i joined those canvassers across michigan with voters, not politicians, and door knocked across utah and missouri where activists won two big campaigns against gerrymandering, watched native americans across the red rock deserts of and put the tribal lands of north dakota mount these desperate heroic pushes to determine their street addresses and make themselves ids. I rode the medicaids express acrosshide homicide with millenial activists who didnt understand why their legislature wouldnt take the obama care money back from the federal government to ensure that 70,000 of their neighbors had health insurance. In alabama, where the state legislature finally under court order returned Voting Rights denied to tens of thousands of former prisoners there, but they wouldnt do anything to actually sign these folks up and get them back on the rolls weapon went door to door, bus station to barber shop width concerned citizens determined to add these folks, their neighbors, back to the voting rolls. They won big, they won everywhere it and was just amazing to watch because it was like this time in which the news cycle feeds your exhaustion and i was able to go out and spend a year sort of riding along with these people who had turned off twitter and stopped watching msnbc and went out and just got to work. In idaho the Medicaid ExpansionInitiative Ban there after two recent graduates from a high school in sand point, way up north in idaho, they were now studying medicine and history but realized they might have Organization Skills that would help a school levy pass in their town that was up against this bitter wellfunded opposition, and they came back to sand point, organized there, they won and they were hungry for more. They decided they would take on healthcare in idaho as their issue and painted that 40yearold rv and they dubbed this he medicaid express and took he from corner to corner of idaho collecting signatures and this one part state as red as taylor swifts lipstick they captured 61 of the volt the Old Fashioned ways. Knocked or doors, persuaded them. I joined them inhood falls falld this idaho falls and this amaze little moment we walk up in the driveway in a parking lot a car with a Bumper Sticker saying vietnam we were winning when i left and im thinking maybe we should move on and go knock on the door down there. That one this one might not be a very good bet. But the man inside comes to door and says, oh, yeah, i know exactly what youre talk us about. My wife falls in that gap. My daughter falls into the gap. Im completely with you. Just by talking to folks. You just got the sense maybe we were not as polarized as we would have been, or as people like to say we are. There was powerful stories to watch in north dakota as well, which is a state that has such clean elects, they dont even bother requiring Voter Registration there but in 2013, right after the native american vote helped cat houston hollywoody heitkamp interest the u. S. Senate, the legislators decided to pass a voter i. D. Lieu that demands a street address. They knew it didnt exist in tribal land and the tribes were able to knock this back in court which the legislature would just keep coming at it every single time court would order this go away. The legislature would come back and refine it and try again, and finally in 2018, just before election day, they get a judge that okayed it and the voter i. D. Restrictions were able to go into law, and these tribes, they just got to work, they got in touch with professors and academics and experts in mapping and they did all this sophisticated gis work to nail down addresses for all of the homes on the trial land and then printed i. D. S. They burned the i. D. Machines out, they made so many. Turnout soared. It was wild. One of the big wins that night, the first native American Woman ever elected to the legislature in north dakota, defeats the man who first proposed the voter i. D. Bill in 2013. So it was Pretty Amazing to just see. And you just you see this happening all over the country. I watched it in maine. Home to this rich tradition of independent candidates, where citizens demanded a vote system that allowed them to rank choices and limit a murielity so candidate and when the voters stood in the wayne, long petition drives not once but twice, and won, these people did not wait for the supreme court. They did not wait for a super hero president ial candidate. They stood up, they acted, they became the protectors of democracy that i think we all imagine that we might actually want our representatives to be. Now, some of these victories have been pushed back on, state legislatures have not embraced them all. Theyve fought them. But i think its important to kind of remember the two steps forward even if theres a half step back. The history of Voting Rights in this country is one of expansion and retraction. Its never been a Straight Line and really our current chapter is just the latest in a struggle over the vote that is old as the nation itself. We might want to manage that the history of the nation is one of everexpanding suffrage but has not been that way. The struggle didnt went if the 13th, 14th and a amended. Didntened with the Voting Rights act and didnt end with this victories on election day of 2018. Theres a lot of work that remains, and the work that remains is going to get a lot more difficult. I mean, we keep a democracy, it turns out, requires a lot of work, but i think what all of these stories show is that when regular citizens unite and fight for the kind of democracy they want, when they grab on to that Martin Luther kings long moral arc of justic