reality, because in media com, we're built to keep you ahead. >> media com, along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> my name is desiree bailey with the san marco bookstore, i want to thank you for coming out tonight. i did first hear about this book in january when i was reviewing the summer catalog with my penguin random house rep and seemed like a good topic, when i saw dr. seabrook was from cnf. let's do an event. they were thrilled and reached out to him and here we are. now, i did not know that we would have so much activity in our state in the last few months between now and then, and i have to confess that i don't know much about gerrymandering and i can honestly say, i have never met an expert. does anyone else feel the same? >> we are looking forward to a conversation that will entightle and educate us. for those of us who have know the had a chance to scan the page. let me introduce a professor and interim chair of administration in north florida. his research examines the intersection of law and politics in the united states with a particular focus on redistricting reform and election administration. he is the author of the book drawing the lines, constraints on gerrymandering in u.s. politics which was published in 2017, as well as the featured title of the evening, one person, one vote, a surprising history of gerrymandering in america. our co-conversationalist this evening is nate monroe of the florida times union. he has been a metro columnist for the florida times union since 2019 and before that he was a beat and investigative reporter uncovering the foe-- focus uncovered jackson city hall, which is the largest municipal government in florida, and prior to arriving in jacksonville in 2013, nate was a reporter for the newspapers in the florida panhandle and south louisiana where he wrote about hurricanes, smalltown corruption. oil spills, army core screwups and mardi gras and bingo at the senior centers. and following that, we will be doing a q & a session. as i mentioned we have c-span with us this evening and they will be recording the proceedings. when you're ready to ask a question if you'll line up at one of the side mic's and wait for everyone to hear you and stop by the bookstore and let knauss if you would like to attend more events like this. again, i thank you and have a good evening. [applause] >> okay. thank you very much desiree, and to san marco books for hosting this event tonight. and thank you all for coming out. this is the second event that i've had on my book tour for one person, one vote. and at the first event which was in portland on friday night, there were four people in the audience. [laughter] >> so, and they were actually outnumbered by my wife and the bookstore employees who were there. and almost all of you, are here to see nate tonight. so-- (laughter) >> and i certainly appreciate him being here to increase my attendance numbers. >> yeah, of course. >> so, i think perhaps the best way to begin is to kind of give you a quick definition and example of what it is that we mean by gerrymandering. it's one of those political terms that a lot of people are kind of aware of and perhaps have some idea of what it is and how it works and it's one of those things that they kind of throw into the bucket or the category of kind of bag democracy. it's one of those elements of our government that is dysfunctional, that obstructs the translation of the people's preferences into government policy, but it's also something that is kind of complex and complicated and i want to begin with a quote, actually, and i'm going to read it from my cheat sheet here to make sure that i get it right because this is the quote that i opened the book with and i think it's probably the best and most suscinct summary of what gerrymandering is that i've encountered and this is a quote by a guy by the name is thomas hoffler. thomas hoffler was a republican political strategist to basically no one had ever heard of until that he died in 2018, and his estranged daughter, stephanie, released to the media a treasure trove of files from his computer which really documented the influence that he had been having behind the scenes on american politics through gerrymandering. and he said, quote, restricting is like an election in reverse, usually the voters get to pick the politicians and redistricting politicians get to pick the voters, and that, i think is perhaps the best way to summarize what it is that we're talking about tonight. >> yes, i think that all of us can feel from time to time like we don't have as much control as we would like of the political process, even though we're voters. how many times have you showed up to the ballot box and reviled every choice that you had. i think that redistricting explains a lot of this kind of lack of agency that voters feel and it's a deliberate thing, redistricting gives the people in power a lot of power to determine their own future to derp the futures ever their chosen successors and we see this on every level and i expect we'll talk tonight maybe even about the city council's recent redistricting process and certainly the state of florida has struggled with this for a long time. >> yeah, and i think that is really what is the core of the problem with gerrymandering. it's that it removes choice from the voters. it removes their ability to hold their government accountable and had a lot of the bad things that we see in our government, the gridlock, the corruption, politicians pursuing their own selfish interests rather than the interests of their constituents stem from the fact that they know they will not be held accountable in any meaningful way for what they do while they're in office. and gerrymandering is a big part of that because it involves taking elections that might previously have been competitive elections where plausibly the republicans or democrats could have won control of the city council in jacksonville or the state legislature in tallahassee and making those elections uncompetitive, drawing districts that are lopsided where the vast majority of the people who live there are either democrats or republicans and when that happens, there's no meanful choice for the people who live in those districts. particularly if you're one of the unfortunate voters who find yourself as a democrat in a heavily republican seat or a republican in a heavily democratic seat. and when that occurs, it really shifts the entire focus, the entire selection process to the primary election, whether it's the republican primary or the democratic primary. and the people who vote in primaries tend to be ideological and inevitably the candidates who emerge from those primaries when they are fairly extreme if the district is not competitive those candidates are pretty much guaranteed to win elections anyway and you just have to look at some of the characters who are representing various districts in the house of representatives right now to kind of see that that process in action. i won't name any names, but i'm pretty sure you know who they are. >> i can name names. >> (laughter) >> you know, one of the interesting things that i took away from your book and i think is a really important point as we talk about redistricting and sort of how things have gotten as bad as they have, like a lot of criminality, a lot of criminal behavior, redistricting has adapted over time, as our understanding about what sort of priorities, policy makers ought to have in mind when they draw districts have changed, as the courts have in the past, sort of tried to control or kind of set rules for what's allowed and hasn't been much of that. as our tools, our data tools and mapping tools have improved, the politicians have adapted to that and come up with more insidious ways of preserving their own power. i think that's a really important theme in your book. i also think an important theme in your book, and i would argue that, you know, we saw that play out on the jacksonville city council level is that when people hear the term redistricting because of the tenor of our national discourse, i think there's an assumption that redistricting only happens when one party roles all the levers of government, but in reality, there is something called bipartisan redistricting which is just as bad and involves people coming to an agreement to protect themselves. which is the most bipartisan issue there is. >> yeah, one of the main things i wanted to accomplish with this book because redistricting and gerrymandering are subjects that a lot of stuff gets written about. a lot of things in the media, a lot of things by academics. what i think is different about this book and unique about this book is that it looks at gerrymandering across the entirety of u.s. history and what i discovered when i began researching this topic is that gerrymandering is it not only as olds at united states itself. it is, in fact, older than the united states itself. and it has its origins in a somewhat quirky practice in british politics known as the rottenburr, one of the ways that kind of british aristocrats traditionally used the arrangements of governments to maintain their stranglehold on power and involved essentially controlling the number of people who would get to vote in the district so you could potentially have a seat in parliament that had 500 or 1,000 people living in it and only three or four were actually eligible to vote and the land owner, or the nobleman would bribe or offer patronage to those voters in order to keep control of the seat. and we saw something similar translated across to the united states during the colonial era, and these kind of early gerrymanders whether they were prior to independence or post independence don't really look a whole lot like gerrymandering as we imagined it today. the image of gerrymandering kind of conjures up the specter of these bizarre and misshapen districts that you see on maps sometimesment as nate was saying, it's only the technology that is available to politicians today and it was not until the 1970's that computers and software were used for the first time in the redistricting process and it was really not until the 2010's that suffocated algorithms and simulations began to enter the scene, and what these allow the redistricters to do is not only draw districts based on what has happened in prior elections, so you can draw a seat the way you con figure it, okay, it looks like this seat has voted republican for the last two or three cycles, redraw this way and we're pretty confident it will vote republican moving forward. this was kind of historically how gerrymandering was done. they would look at the census numbers, they would look at how people had voted in prior elections and kind of extrapolate that into the future. and often times, that would work for maybe one election or possibly two elections, but then people would kind of move around a little bit and perhaps the political winds or tides would start to change direction and often gerrymandering would not remain robust throughout an entire decade or even longer. but what happens today is that they have these sophisticated models by which they can simulate how the districts they draw will perform under a wide variety of hypothetical future scenarios. and they can then tweak the boundaries and tweak the lines to kind of create the optimal gerrymander to remain robust throughout an entire decade and there are use states that are for all intents and purposes no longer really democracies in terms of their legislative elections. and the example i begin the book with, and i think it's one of the most glaring ones, is the state of wisconsin. after the 2010 election, the republican party controlled state government in the state of wisconsin, and they drew what i considered to be one of the most severe gerrymanders in american history. and as a result of that, the republican party has retained control of around about two-thirds of the seats in the wisconsin state legislature for the entirety of the last decade. and in that decade, there were two elections where the democrats won the popular vote overall in the state of wisconsin and yet, the republicans maintain control of two-thirds of the seats and that's what gerrymandering can do, it can render, an entire state meaning democracy for an entire decade. a consequence of that, guess who was in control of redistricting in wisconsin, the same republicans of a decade ago. that concerns me moving forward. gerrymandering is not just something that allows politicians to put the thumbs on the scale for a couple of elections, it's something that allows a political party to essentially create a one-party state and use gerrymandering decade after decade to kind of exclude their opponents from the political process. >> it was not shocking at all to see in this book that redistricting like almost every other malevolent force in the world today is uniquely american. we took something from britain which, you correct me if i'm wrong, but, i mean, the redistricting that was sort of the ancestor of what we have today was more like malapportionment. kind of a massive not changing boundaries as population shifted over time to something that's incredibly proactive. this regime of like data analysis that you're describing, i mean, there are -- i mean, this is an effort to take people's voice and vote away today, and into the future. and you know, it's incredibly effective. i mean, it's really, it's worth considering that, you know, in florida, the legislature in the-- not this latest round, but in the 2010's the redistricting process then, it's not often described in these terms, but i mean, that was one of the largest, most brazen corruption scandals in florida history, you know, at the trial court level judge found that there was a systemic sort of scheme underway by the legislature to draw maps with partisan intent, contrary to the law and the legislature went to great lengths to do this, they concealed their communications with political consultants, they deleted records shortly after redistricting was done, even though they knew those should have been public records as a matter of law, but knew there would be litigation filed and that would destroy important discovery. you know, these are the stakes. like, the stakes are quite literally the control of our democracy and all of our little democracies in our states and in our cities. you know, i was really interested-- i had no idea about the history of it and i had no idea it was as old as you described and, you know, i just think like, maybe we can-- maybe we can run through, i feel like you should explain the donald trump being on a turkey in the crowd because that's a thing in the book. >> i can explain that. so, one of the things that i do in the book is present examples of what i think are some of the most interesting or hilarious or in this case, hilarious and disturbing districts in american history and there's kind of a game that those who are in the business of analyzing gerrymandering like to play, which is to kind of describe districts in terms of what they look like. so if you have a particularly misshapen district on a map, people will go to great lengths to kind of insinuate what it is that that district resembles, and sometimes they actually look more like the things than on other occasions, but there are a couple from the state of new york that i talk about in the book, one from the 1990's and one from the 2000's. the first one is a district in central new york state, kind of a big isolated island in the middle of state new york that if you look at it resembles almost to an uncanny level, an image of abraham lincoln riding on a vacuum cleaner. ... i can testify that it is remarkable all the way down to the hat. and then there's another district from a decade later which is a district that kind of runs up and down the hudson valley nor up-and-down hudson valley north of new york city, and my nickname for this district was donald trump urinating on a small turkey. you can see this if you read the book. you may not want to see it, and you'll certainly never be able to unseat it, but that is what the district resembles. >> and it's real. like he's not be asking you. [inaudible] >> there's one of the district that a write about in the book as well and this was kind of interesting because if you go back historically, a lot of times the districts were drawn in a way where not all of the parts of them were physically connected to one another. this is what is known as continuity, the idea that this is notfe a requirement under federal law that districts have to be contiguous, that all of the physical part of the district have to beal actually geographically connected to one another. and there's one major exception to this, which is that districts are allowed to cross directly over a body of water. so a river, lake, something like that, because otherwise it's physically impossible to divide estate into districts if you don't have the ability to cross those water features. back in the i 1980s there was a congressman from california and his name was phil burton. i i kind of credit him in the bk as being kind of come one of the inventors of the modern gerrymander, the type of gerrymander that relies not so much on malapportionment, having very different populations between districts and estate. the title of the book one person, one vote comes from a series of supreme court decisions in the 1960s that required under the constitution all districts to have equal population. and so those one person, one vote decisions really changed gerrymandering from a situation where politicians could draw one district over here that at 500 voters in it and another one over here that has 5000 voters in it. and that washe away that distris were often manipulated. but since the 1970s redistricting has to be done in compliance with this one person, one vote principal, which means that those who are responsible for it have to c be a little moe creative when it comes to manipulating the lines to ensure whatever the political outcome is that they are looking for. and so phil burton, congressman from california, was in control of california's redistricting in the early 1980s. on the other side of that debate was the aforementioned thomas, the republican political strategist. this was kind of his first rodeo in his 50 year gerrymandering career. and what phil burton decided to do in order to create a gerrymander that would allow the democrats to win n the maximum number of seats in the state of california was the basically draw a district that included three disconnected parts of the bay area around san francisco. it had parts of downtown san francisco.ty at the city of alejo right across the bay from their and then it had a large rural section of maren county across any other side of the bay again. this was described as a time as the only district in california history to cross the san francisco bay twice without the use of a bridge. but what he did was take advantage of this idea that you can include kind of non-contiguous territory in the district if they goes directly across a body of water. in this instance there was a district across the san francisco bay twice that kind of jam together these three of entirely unrelated communities in order to secure the outcome that he wasas looking for. >> i feel like one thing that's important, we've had some fun, without some fun withon this tonight, is that people associate redistricting in weird shaped districts.th but that isn't the like, not a requirement to redistricting. redistricting inn essence is any drawing of boundaries that's done to protect somebody's interest. you actually let out sort of, you sort of argue for specific definition of what redistricting is in the book and i'm curious if you can kind of run us through that? >> that's a really important point because i think it leads to a tendency to discount gerrymandering when i' doesn't produce districts that are bizarrely misshapen. one example might be the reason gerrymander by our states govern ron desantis who of course rejected the maps that have been proposed by the state legislature. he proposed his own map and the result of that map is that in florida, estate that is pre-close to close to 50-50 democrats and republicans, it's almost guaranteed that republicans will win 20 of the 28 florida seats in the house oi representatives in the november elections. so take on a given illustration of howde gerrymandering works in practice, maybe it's best to think of a hypothetical. i am a college professor i love thinking in hypotheticals and it also kindd of removes some of te complicated factors and some of the messiness that you already, that you always get with real-world examples. so let's imagine a hypothetical completely made up midsized american city. let's call it saxon field. saxon will has a city government which is made up of an elected mayor, a get elected by the voters of the city as a whole and it has a three-member city council who are elected from districts and the statisticss have to havee equal populations to one another. let's also, , to keep things simple, hypothesize that the city of jacksonville -- i city. the city of jacksonville is made up of 50%te supporters of one political party, the red team, and 50% supporters of another political party, the blue team. so those are the only candidates who are contesting elections in saxonville. >> who was the mayor of saxonville? >> we'll get to that ino a second. so the mayoral election in saxonville is the opportunity for gerrymandering because gerrymandering requires boundaries. sorequires districts. so the outcome of the elections for mayor are going to be driven by, i that can be driven by turnout. the more red team or more blue team voters turnout in election and there will be driven by the quality of the candidates. so let's say that the blue team nominates particularly and competent candidate for mayor of saxonville. let's call him -- he's likely to lose that election because it's a 50-50 city and he's not a very good candidate for mayor. let's say that the red team nominates a pretty good candidate, some young up-and-coming star politician, let's call him lawrence trevor. laurence tribe or is likely to win that election because again, it's fair. it's 50-50. the voters get to decide the outcome. we just have a census inaw saxonville and this three city council district need to be redrawn in order to comply with one person, one vote, the constitutional principles thatt are talked about a minute ago. and it just so happens that the red team at the time of redistricting is in control of both the mayor's office and a majority of theit city council. there are a couple of different ways that you could draw a fair map for the city of saxonville. you could try and make all three of the districts reasonably competitive. you could put approximately equal numbers of team read and team blue voters into all three of the districts and then the election would depend on how good the candidates are, how good their campaigns are. do they connect with their constituents? alternatively, if that's not practical, if the voters in saxonville are not evenly h distributed come you red team neighborhoods and blue team neighborhoods, maybe you could call one district that has a blue team majority. you could draw one district that has a red team majority and you can draw one district that's pretty competitive. again, that's going to leave the choice, the outcome in the hands of thef voters. in most elections the red teamng is going to win one seat, the blue team iss going to win one seat and the competitive district is goings to determine who controls the city council. that is in theory how democracy is supposed tose work. but let's not imagine a gerrymandering scenario. so let's say that the red team in control of redistricting draws one of the three districts so that they pack in all of the blue team voters that they can find. in this district ends up as 80% blue team voters and 20% red team voters. for the other two districts they draw them so that they have 65% red team voters and 35% blue team voters. so there you have three districts. they are in compliance with one person, one vote. they all have the same population. one district is 80-20 blue team. two distance are 65, five, 35 red team. that is in a gerrymander because none of those three districts are competitive. none of those three districts are likely to change hands even when you take into account the things that might happen over the course of a decade. people move around within the city. new voters come in. people move out. but none of the changes are going to be significant enough to move any of the seats into a situation where they are likely to change hands. and even if they are launched, trevor gets impeached or misappropriation of city funds, his parties going to be pretty unpopular that is not going to be sufficient to shift the power enough to make any of those seats competitive. you basically drawn the districts in such a way that you guarantee that no matter what happens, , no matter how the people vote, the red team is going to win to district in the city council and the blue team is going to win one. that said gerrymandering works and that has what has occurred not only here in saxonville but across the state of florida and in in a whole host of places around the united states. >> you know, it's interesting because richard describing or packing a certain subset of voters into a district where you get one district that's like very highly concentrated blue team and then two data maybe not as concentrated but still very like red team friendly. this gets to what we're talking about about adaptability, that in american history, with minority voters, i think the strategy at one time was vote dilution, to draw districts to dilute the vote. then we have these court rulings and where the civil rights movement and there's an emphasis on sort of mandatory minority access seats. so then the strategy becomes packing. so we won't dilute these voters and if we have to make space for them will make space for them in the smallest number that we can, and so what that looks like in practice, i mean, there is a city council district in jacksonville that is has a voting age population that is like 75% black, which is way over the amount necessary to ensure that black voters in that district get to elect the candidate of their choice. this varies by district but, i mean, sometimes come sometimes the number only needs to be about 48-50% of the voting age population being a minority to give minority voters a a chano elect a candidate of their choice. in practice, again we can see districts with white yes 60 and 70% 70. there are four minute access seats that have foreign access of what they need to provide to actually be minority access seats. the council i would argue engaged in this bipartisan redistricting phenomenon that we talked about earlier. the democrats on the city council were in many ways more fierce defenders of this gerrymandered map than the republicans were. and this map disadvantages democrats and minority voters. so, i mean, it's kind of amazing you see this stuff play out, but this is happening everywhere. >> yeah. i think one of the major themes of the book is how gerrymandering can take a number of different forms. we do not think about gerrymandering in the context of partisan gerrymandering, kind of like the saxonville example where one political party controls the redistricting process and the user to try and keep themselves in power in order to try and maintain that a majority in the city council, or the legislature, or whatever. but in kind of delving back into the history of gerrymandering i found that there were numerous different types of gerrymander is that have been used for various different political purposes, which is why the definition of gerrymandering that i use and begin the book with a simply that it's the manipulation of districts for some kind of political purpose. doesn't have to be partisan but there has to be a political goal in mind. i write a lot in the book about how gerrymandering was used as a tool of racial oppression, most notably in the 1970s. because what happened with the civil rights movement in the 1960s was that all of the traditional tools of disenfranchisement that were used against african-americans in the south to prevent them from registering to vote, to prevent them from participating in elections, suddenly all of those were outlined by the federal government and the federal government began aggressively scrutinizing southern states in order to ensure their compliance with the civil rights act and the voting rights act. and so, racial gerrymandering in the 1970s kind of became the new way that the white majority in states like texas in georgia and louisiana could exclude african-americans from political office, that they could draw the district in such a way that black voters were dispersed among a number of districts where there was a white majority. and because there was what's called racially polarized voting and operation because the white voters tended to vote for white candidate and the black voters tended to vote for black candidates, this essentially ensured that no black candidates could ever realistically be elected from any of the districts in the state. and thankfully, both the supreme court and the u.s. congress began to crack down on that kind of racial gerrymandering in the 1980s. it's what's known as vote dilution and there was legislation passed by congress in 1982 to amend the voting rights act and tanf crackdown on this kind of vote dilution. and there were series of decisions by the supreme court to prevent states from doing that moving forward. and so thankfully that kind of racial gerrymandering has become a lot less prevalent in recent decades. but as mentioned politicians are resourceful and they are strategic, and you close up one avenue of manipulation to them and they will figure out another way to achieve the same goal. and so what the republican party begin doing in the 1990s was instead of dividing minority voters among a bunch of different districts where none of the candidates could get elected, instead they figured they would ask you to super majority of african-americans or latinos or asian-americans into a single district. then no matter how large their numbers, they only get to elect one member of the legislature. and this kind of packing had the advantage of benefiting republican candidates in surrounding areas because almost all the minority voters were democrats. so they could pack as many minority democrats as they could into an individual district, and that would have the effect of allowing republicans to win almost all of the surrounding seats. and this is what started going on all over the south in the 1990s, and it's it's what we've seen happening here in jacksonville in this most recent redistricting cycle. jacksonville has a large african-american population and the city council packed all of those voters into a few super majority districts which essentially ensures that there's almost no opportunity for black candidates to get elected from anywhere else in the city. >> one thing that strikes me is like the pace of how quickly things have gotten worse. when i was reporter in 2010, in that redistricting cycle, i was working in south louisiana. the school board, the parish governments, the county governments, every little, you know, no matter how small this political boundaries were, when they were redrawn they had to be submitted to the u.s. justice department for preclearance. so they were not allowed to approve anything on their own, and watching those processes play out everyone had to hire a consultant. the process was very professionalized. it was very formalized. the reasons why the districts were drawn the way the world were pretty clearly explained. the politicians themselves didn't actually have a lot of -- they probably have more control than the exerted but it was like a very professionally run process. the supreme court has since done away with his preclearance concept, and you know, what we see now is all those bumpkin politicians that i covered in 2010 unafraid to draw these districts however they like. the only way to hold them accountable is to go to court where they are likely to encounter a judge who is pretty hostile towards the idea of intervening and demanding that a certain set of political boundaries gets changed. i was wondering if you could maybe walk us through like some of the modern supreme court decision that have really at least in my view undermined our democracy by kind of closing off the course as an avenue for people to get relief? >> yeah. so there had been two kind of parallel threads of supreme court cases that have concerned gerrymandering, who have had the cases where activists attorneys have been attempting, unsuccessfully, to try and persuade the justices to step in and say that the most egregious examples of partisan gerrymandering, kind of like the one i spoke about in wisconsin a little bit earlier, that these violate the constitution, that these violate the equal protection clause because you are discriminated against voters based on their political affiliation. you are configuring the district in such a way that one half of the political spectrum has no meaningful opportunity to influence the election outcomes. and there has been really free significant cases. actually i guess four significant cases. one from the 1980s where the justices kind of sad that, well, we think that there are some circumstances where partisan gerrymandering may violate the constitution, and here are some thoughts about how we think you might go about adjudicating that. but the justices were really split between several different opinions and there was no clear majority, and that was unfortunate because it didn't really provide a roadmap to the lower courts to have any idea of what was unconstitutional or constitutional when it came to gerrymandering. and so fast-forward to 2004, you had another case involving a challenge to districts in pennsylvania. and at this point it kind of looked like the court was getting ready to lay their cards on the table. you might four conservative justices who wanted to say that courts should not even be entertaining these questions. you had four liberal justices who thought that the supreme court should really step in and strike down some of these really bad gerrymanders. venue justice kennedy in the middle, and justice kennedy, as was often his style, refused to make up his mind and we had another split decision, another decade of no clear guidance on the supreme court about how lower courts should be digging with jerry gerrymanders. then in his most recent decade we had two cases the one involving the wisconsin gerrymandering. the justices dismissed that went on procedural grounds, and then you had kind of the final nail in the coffin which was a 2018 decision which was a challenge to a north carolina gerrymander and that was a case where in any opinion by chief justice john roberts the justices basically said we are closing the doors of the federal courthouses to gerrymandering challenges entirely. you can no longer litigate these cases in federal court. we have also seen a lot of decisions, and i touched on these a little bit earlier, dealing with racial gerrymandering. the court in the 1980s kind of crack down on racial gerrymandering, but then in recent decades with the shelby county decision they removed that preclearance requirement that was crucial in preventing these states that had traditionally engaged in racial discrimination from backsliding. and predictably, in the decades since shelby county we've seen quite a bit of that backsliding starting to occur. it's been happening in louisiana in the most recent redistricting cycle where the the state dd to draw a second black influenced congressional district. a lower court said that this was a violation of the voting rights act, and the supreme court reversed that decision and said that the map that the legislature had drawn could go into effect. and i think that decision emboldened ron desantis to eliminate the two minority influence districts, the out loss lawson seat here and north florida and then val demings seat down in the orlando area. and the desantis' gerrymander basically gets rid of two districts that have reliably elected african american candidates. this would have never been possible prior to shelby county. it should be possible under florida law because florida has a constitutional amendment which prohibits diminishment of minority voting strength. but the florida supreme court did not see it that way and in a recent ruling they allowed desantis' act to go into effect. it happens that the florida supreme court has a seven to zero republican majority on it right now, including three of the seven justices that were avoided by desantis' himself so it seems like he is confident that the state supreme court is going to interpret it this way. >> and soon to be a fourth. >> yesterday will soon have a state supreme court were a majority of the justices have been appointed by the current governor. adding i have a couple of really major concerns moving forward. the first is about the florida supreme court is going to strike down the fair districts amendment. these were the amendments to the state constitution that the voters approved back in 2010 and which brevet both partisan gerrymandering and racial gerrymandering. my second major concern is that the supreme court is either going to strike down or sharply limit section two of the voting rights act of 1965. the legislation that requires states to take the interests of minority voters into account when drawing districts. i think there there's a de that both of those things could happen within the next two or three years. >> so i think sort of matching the tenor of those comments, there is a thread of hope that you kind of weave through your book. >> not much. >> but i was stopped short of saying that it is an optimistic book. that is not a criticism. i myself am not an optimist about much. but i wonder if you can sort of maybe like explain to us your view how optimistic or not argue about the future? >> the reason i have at least some hope about this is that i think there has been meaningful progress in combating gerrymandering, particularly within the last decade or so. and it's progress that that at the impetus of politicians and most of the time not at the impetus of judges either. it's come at the impetus of the people in states like florida where the people have the opportunity to collect signatures, to place an initiative on the ballot either to amend the state constitution or to put in place a regular statute. there have been a number of redistricting reform anti-gerrymandering initiatives that have been voted on in the last decade. and every single one of those has been approved by the voters of their respective states. and we're not just talking about blue states here. we've seen them approved in utah we've seen them approved in florida, michigan, ohio. every opportunity, every chance that the people have to weigh in on this question, the message that they are sending is clear. we don't want politicians controlling this process. we want to be able to choose our politicians we don't want the politicians to be able to choose their voters. and so i think in the next decade we will continue to see incremental reforms at the state level, particularly in those states where those constitutional initiatives are available. but that's not in every state, and so in states where you don't have that option of direct change from the people, here kind of relying on the politicians to reform gerrymandering. and that doesn't always work terribly well because those are the ones who are currently reaping the greatest benefits from the current system. and so i have less optimism in those states. i've greater optimism in states where ballot initiatives are available, and i have somewhere in between a level of optimism when it comes to congress because while what happens to fix gerrymandering at the state level in state elections is going to be decided by each of the individual 50 states. congress has the power to fix gerrymandering when it comes to federal elections. they constitution in the elections clause gives congress the authority to determine how members of congress will be elected. and congress has at various times placed all kinds of different constraints and requirements on that process. and we have seen just within the last two years to different bills introduced that would try to help fix the problem of gerrymandering. one which would've required every state to create an independent citizens commission that would be responsible for drawing districts after each census. that's the approach that i favor. it's an approach that is worked well in states like california and colorado and michigan. we saw another bill proposed as kind of a compromise bill by senator joe manchin which would've placed legal constraints on state legislatures when it comes to drawing congressional districts. it will probably not surprise you to learn that neither of those bills was actually successfully enacted. they were both filibustered in the senate. part of the reason for that bill is that they were introduced as part of the democrats kind of omnibus voting rights reform provisions. and there's a lot of stuff in there that is more controversial. what i would like to see congress to and i hope this happens in the near future is to introduce redistricting reform, anti-gerrymandering legislation as a stand-alone bill. and let's just have members of the house and members of the senate vote on it. let's see where they stand, because it's overwhelmingly popular with the people, whether it's polling which suggests that democrats, republicans, independents, no americans like gerrymandering. or whether it's when we've seen the people vote on it, it's pretty clear what they want to happen. at hope we see more meaningful progress in the next decade because obviously we have not enough to fix the problem so far. >> the only person that you're the only person i very say you are hopeful that congress. should we open up to questions? >> i think that's a good idea. >> don't be shy. come up to the microphones. >> is in it to the u.s. constitution gives state legislatures the authority to do redistricting? and if that is true, how could congress make the change you want by law? >> so it works a a little differently depending on when you are talking about state elections or federal elections. [inaudible] >> when it comes to state elections, that's going to be determined by each individual state constitution, and congress has no authority to interfere with that. when it comes to federal elections, elections for the u.s. house and the u.s. senate, the constitution gives authority to both state legislatures and to the u.s. congress. this is a provision called the elections clause, and i'll try and recite it to the best of my ability off the top of my head, but it basically says that state legislatures are responsible for setting the times, places, and manner of elections for senators and representatives, but congress may at any time make or alter such regulations. so it allows states to set the procedures that will be used to run federal elections, but it also empowers congress to place its own restrictions, its own alterations on what states will do. so it's about clause specifically the provision that allows congress to make or alter those regulations, that empowers them to pass legislation that would prohibit gerrymandering, but only for elections to the u.s. house. it wouldn't give them any authority to tell states how to run their own state elections. >> and so i think the reddest -- we districts in florida and in jacksonville tell a competing story about what's best for which party so you complained about the bipartisan gerrymander and the role of the democrats supporting this essentially insuring their subservience to the next ten years in jacksonville. the democrats at the statehouse went the opposite way. they kicked and screamed and drag their feet and protested in a map that would've been roughly 17 to 11. how they got along with that 17 to 11 map with a roughly unanimous support in the state legislature, might that have enabled them at that point to maybe then stick with that and overturn the initial veto from desantis' and leaving them better off? >> i mean, if the argument is that there is any scenario in which the florida legislature was not going to cave to ron desantis because the democrats would have been nicer, i don't, i just, i don't buy that theory. i know that that's a thing that is out there. i think we were going to get the map that desantis wanted just by virtue of the republican-controlled legislature and desantis' standing with voters in florida and with the party. >> yeah, i tend, i i tend to e with that. and ultimately i think it's -- >> caller: [phone ringing] >> that is an intense ring tone. [laughing] >> ultimately i think it's kind of, it's a lose, lose situation, that you can perhaps extract some concessions if you go along with the process. that's basically what the democrats here in jacksonville decided to do. i think it's notable that once again in a city that is basically 50-50 between democrats and republicans, once again we are going to have a city council where you have a, what is it, nine to four when you exclude the at large -- and 94 republican majority in on the city council for the next decade. maybe that will shift one or two seats either way but essentially there's a 0% chance of the democrats will win a a majorif the jacksonville city council in the next decade. cognizant of that fact i think the incumbent members of the council decided that they would put their own careers ahead of the interests of the people. if they play ball with the republicans they basically get to hand tailored their own districts to ensure that they at least get to stick around for as long as you want to empower. the democrats in tallahassee i think we're going to get roughshod over by desantis, whatever they did. it was a lose, lose situation and i almost think sometimes that the bipartisan gerrymanders are almost worse than the partisan ones because it's one thing for a political party to use its influence to try and gain as much of an edge as it can within legal means. at least to some extent that is politics as usual and it's something that politicians have done for a time, time immemorial. but when you have two had a polar opposites, democrats and republicans, they agree on nothing, but the one thing that they are able to cooperate on is getting together when it comes time to draw the districts and basically carving up the maps so that all of them get to keep their seats, all of them get to stay in office, this basically happened for 50 years in the state of new york from the 1960s to the 2010s, new york state had a situation where the democratic party controlled the state assembly and the republican party controlled the state senate. and every decade each chamber gerrymandered their own districts so that they would keep control while agreeing to allow the opposing party in the other chamber to draw their individual map. this is the longest period of an interrupted, divided legislative control in a single state in u.s. history. there is nothing that even comes close. for five decades the same voters returned a democratic majority to the state assembly and a republican majority to the state senate solely because of how the districts were drawn. that almost seems a worse to me because it's politicians come together and sing can't agree on anything else other than subverting the will of the electorate, undermining the ability of voters to hold us accountable and ensuring that we all get to keep our jobs. >> one final point i'll make about the jacksonville redistricting process. i mean, i would agree that i think the local democrats were in practical terms not in a great position to affect the outcome that they got. there is a super majority on, the republicans hold a super majority on the city council and they certainly were not going to okay the creation of a fifth minority access seat. however, i mean, this kind of bizarre spectacle we saw play out was the democrats on the city council argued as forcefully as any republican that this map was not only the best we're going to get like this morally upstanding how dare you suggest we could've done something different otherwise map, which is odd if you are concerned about minority voters and their ability to choose the candidates of their choice. this is demonstrably not the best map and is not the best they could of done and is not the best they could a push for. whether they could've gotten it or not is a different question, but that's kind of, you know, i think when we are calling it a bipartisan gerrymander in jacksonville. i mean, that's kind of what it was. the democrats got co-opted into providing cover to the city for this map, and is not a good map. >> thank you for writing your book. i just had a question. in this day in age with all of the technology that we have, we have latitude and longitude widy do we come up with something using technology to evenly distribute areas and nothing is perfect so it scenario a like for instant hitting a lake happens, then you do a, b, or c, something along those lines where it's more rule-based and automated instead of just letting people's opinions run awry? >> yak thanks for the question. there has been quite a bit of research that has looked at doing redistricting using algorithms. so instead of having humans sit down and manipulate the software and decide where the districts are going to be drawn, instead you can have, you can have an algorithm basically draw thousands of different potential maps and then you can choose one that optimizes whatever criteria it is that you are looking for. i think that can be a valuable tool, but i also don't think that it's a solution, mostly because there is no kind of platonic ideal of a good redistricting plan. redistricting is all about trade-offs, that there are mutually exclusive things that you may want to achieve and you cannot achieve all of those things at the same time. you can perhaps tell the algorithm that you want it to draw a lot of competitive districts. you can tell the algorithm that you want it to follow existing communities, existing county and municipal boundaries. you can tell the algorithm that you want it to draw districts that are pretty compact, that are fairly regularly shaped, that don't have as our contortions and appendages and things that look really weird on a map. you can tell the algorithm that you want it to prioritize the protection of the interests of minority voters, to draw districts that will ensure that have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. but you cannot tell the algorithm to do all of these things at the same time because it's impossible. they are mutually exclusive. you cannot have districts that preserve communities and also fair and competitive, because most communities are not fair and competitive. americans tend to cluster together into neighborhoods that are more democratic and neighborhoods that a more republican. so when you grouped together similarly situated constituents, you often end up with the district that is not especially competitive. so i think you're right that that kind of technology can be a useful tool when it comes to redistricting, but ultimately it depends on what the inputs to the algorithm are and it depends on human choices about what to prioritize in redistricting. >> i think a big picture taken with in your book, in a lot of ways is that our system by and large relies on the people we elect to make the right decision instead of the decision that's protecting themselves. and politicians as a group over time are fundamentally incapable of making that choice enough time for us to not have a completely screwed up the system. >> right. and gerrymandering incentivizes them to make the wrong choice in that situation. because one of the effects of gerrymandering is that we have fewer competitive districts today than really at any other point in u.s. history. of the 435 seats in the u.s. house of representatives, somewhere around 30 to 35 of those are going to be competitive seats in the november elections later this year. there are 30 to 35 seats out of 435 where both parties have a meaningful opportunity to win that seat. and the others have been drawn so that they are so lopsided either the democrats or the republican is basically guaranteed to win. and when elections are not competitive, politicians cannot be held accountable for what they do in office, and so it becomes all the more tempting to prioritize their own interests over the interests of their constituents. >> thank you for both being here today. with things like the fair districts amendment passing or being passed in the process, and how the florida supreme court reacted, and how current super majority of national supreme court is, what is the alternative? what is the strategy for fair redistricting even in places where you have laws on the books that require either nonpartisan or fair redistricting when you have courts that get to decide what the meaning of is is? >> i think that there districts amendments actually work really well a decade ago, or at least as well as they could have been expected to work. so what happened is that voters placed these provisions and the state constitution. those provisions said you cannot engage in partisan gerrymandering, and rick scott and the republican majority in tallahassee at the time went ahead and ignored them and put in place districts for the congressional seats and for the state senate that were republican gerrymanders. and it took a few years, but in 2015 the state supreme court struck those districts down and required the legislature to redraw them. and what replaced it was a pretty fair map. democrats had a reasonable shot. they didn't end up doing it but they had a reasonable shot if they could run better campaigns and better candidates at running after winning the state senate of the tail end of the last decade and had a regional shot at winning a majority of florida's congressional seats. neither of those things are possible anymore. but the supreme court, even though it had a republican majority, or it may have been more close to being evenly divided at the time, but it was considerably less ideologically skewed that it is today. i have a lot less confidence that the state supreme court will uphold and faithfully apply the fair districts amendments this time around, which is why i think what we need to do here in florida is put a new state constitutional amendment on the ballot and say we gave you guys an opportunity to abide by this. you failed to do it for two consecutive decades. so now we're going to take that power away from you. we are going to create a nonpartisan independent commission made up of regular florida citizens, and they are going to have the power to control districts. i think the main thing that i took away from this book is that the main problem with redistricting in the united states and the problem that every other nation has managed to fix is simply the fact that we allow politicians to control it. and when you take politicians out of the equation you are not always going to get a fair map. you shouldn't always expect to get a fair map but you are going to get one a lot more often than we do now. >> thank you for your book. thank you for this talk. i've lived here my whole life and i apparently have been swimming in this sea of denial. i have tried to get the vote out, get people involved in politics. i'm not hearing a lot of hope. i guess i always knew it, the leaseback you i knew it was happening but this really spells it out in black and white terms. how to proceed, i guess, i'm sorry i'm struggling to make the question. how do i get people to vote? is it the responsibility of the voters to find a solution for this? i think it is. it is our responsibility of the voters to use the people who are in office if they voted for them or not to try to enact change. i see no reason for change because of the way you spell that out. there has to be a way for me to convince a woman in murray hill that a vote will count and a woman in palm theater that hearse matters as much as a woman in murray hill. or i don't see a democracy anymore and i cannot live in that country. i certainly am having a hard time living in that state. any hope outside of the ballot initiative that we can try to push for? kelly get out and try to get those initiatives by sheer numbers of just try to get people to unite under this scenario you have presented, or do we go about our business away we have for all my life? i just don't know which way to proceed, and and i do appreu bringing it to our attention. thank you. >> i think we're all screwed, so you better take this question. [laughing] >> okay. i guess i have to try and find the silver lining in this begin. what i would say is that a lot of times you are going to go to the voting booth, and most of the things, most of the choices you have are not going to be meaningful but i think there will always be something on your ballot that is meaningful. there's always going to be a race, where it's city council or whether it something even further down the ballot. there's going to be some opportunity there for your voice to be heard and for it to be,, for it to make a difference. i think that as depressing as things are in our political system right now, i do think there is hope to try to fix those things. it's not going to be easy and i know that it's depressing to have to kind of fight a constant holding action to cling on to sort of the vestiges of democracy that we still have. but the alternative is all of that going away. i think people have to put in, put in the effort, that an engaged citizenry, and this is something that i have done quite a bit of work on. one of the things that i do is i work as a consultant for the florida department of education on on the civic literacy initiative, which is designed to try and get students in k-12 and in our public colleges and universities engage in politics, interested in politics come equipped with the knowledge and the tools that they need to become effective and engaged democratic citizens. hopefully, that has an impact, but i think it's hard and i think you just have too kind to say that, that we need to, we need to fight for this. we need to fight not only to try and make things better, but we need to fight to preserve what we already have. maintaining a healthy representative democracy requires citizen engagement. it doesn't take care of itself. the framers of our constitution provided us with many of the institutions to have such a system, and a lot of those institutions have weathered for centuries now. but they did not supply the virtues and the norms necessary to sustain that in perpetuity. that is our responsibility as citizens, and it is only through participation, no matter how small, voting in elections, getting involved in your community, doing volunteer work, all of these things make a contribution towards improving our politics, and it's only by aggregating all of those together by getting as many people as possible involved that change eventually occurs. >> i would say that on, i won't just let my last comment be that we are totally screwed. i think all of us struggle. anyone who is specifically engage struggles on the individual level with the city of like helplessness. certainly in newspaper, you know, in my 20s away in obscurity? if you are a campaign organizer you might fear the same. you might feel like your efforts don't measure up to the challenges we face, which are quite significant. the one thing that you can do that will guarantee that nothing will get better is to stop those things. i see that as an argument for just carrying on. civic engagement is the only way we are going to dig ourselves out of it, and even if that seems inadequate, it's not. so, yeah. >> wow. that was, i would have to say and intellectually stimulating evening. i want to thank everyone for coming out and being part of the engaged sister we have in jacksonville. i am really excited with the turnout that we had. i didn't know what to expect. and again i want to thank everyone for coming. we do have books available and dr. seabrook will be signing outside on the left if anyone wants to book signed. we're open for more if you guys want it, , just let me know. so thank you. [applause] >> booktv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors discussing the latest nonfiction books. at 8 p.m. eastern former texas senator phil gramm and mathematical economist john early take a critical look at economic disparity in the united states with their book the myth of american inequality. .. of american inequality. up-and-down hudson valley north s author clint smith. his new book is "how the word is reckoning with the history of slavery, you might know mr. smith through