Transcripts For CSPAN2 Electoral Reform 20170926

Campaigns with bipartisan majorities to strengthen and protect civil rights laws during the reagan and bush presidencies, very active since then and a friend of mine for 37 years. Leslee sherrill is former president of abc news, fellow of the school of politics working on a nonpartisan initiative, democracy project which focuses on Electoral Reform with ralph. She worked as white house staffer at the Manhattan Institute for policy and research. Pete peterson is the dean and senior fellow at Pepperdine University school of Public Policy, 2014 republican candidate for california secretary of state and in another state he might have succeeded. Trevor potter, former chairman of the United States federal election commission, former attorney for senator john mccain and president george hw bush, i assume not at the same time, founder, president and general counsel of the Campaign Legal center which is working in areas of Campaign Finance and elections, political communication and government ethics. A superb comoderator, adam grushan, is Vice President of our student group, a standalone student group, we are proud to be associated with them. He is a senior at the university of Southern California and he will kick it off with the first question which all of you could take a whack at. First off, you for being here. We really appreciate it is students hearing from you guys and hearing your Expert Opinions and thoughts on such an important issue. What i am interested in is the fact that we tried to reform the Electoral College for 60 years, we proposed 700 amendments and they have all failed. Is this tenable . Can we reform the college . What are your thoughts . Who wants to go first . I will take the initial crack. First of all i want to thank everybody involved for the extraordinary opportunity and i thank all of us for figuring out ways to address the extreme partisanship and polarization in this country right now. This first question is related to that. No question there is a strong bipartisan majorities that wants to do something about the Electoral College. The problem is, i was in law school last time there was a significant effort to abolish the Electoral College and have direct vote, two president of candidates in favor of it, bipartisan majorities in the house and senate. The problem is our checks and balances, you need filibuster proof in the senate on something that controversial and takes two thirds of both houses and three quarters of the states. Virtual impossibility on any issue i can think of in the United States, passing that kind of constitutional amendment. That does not mean, however, the we cant try to reform the Electoral College in the sense of how the electors vote. There are many ways of looking at this. I dont want to filibuster, i could go through all of them. Many of us would like the direct vote. If we cant get it and i dont we can, we can do the National Popular vote which 11 states have already adopted, 165 electoral votes. They are saying passing a law in these states that if there is a candidate, and there will be, who has got the most votes, they will commit their electors to that candidate with the most votes. Whether the electors carry their state. Once they get to 270 state laws would become active because 270 is how many votes you need in the Electoral College. There are other ways of doing this. For example proportional representation. A lot of us feel strongly that would be a great way to go. If you get 45 president ial candidate in a particular state you get 45 of the electors. The problem with that is it would increase Voter Participation, would respect polarization and partisanship but it can be gained. For example of california was proportional representation, 45 , 55 , texas decides not to do it and all the votes in texas go to a particular candidate, democrats in this case would be at a disadvantage but you can turn it around and texas does proportional representation but california doesnt and democrat in california are at a disadvantage. There are others that will be discussed but we should continue to talk about reform of how these electors come about. There have to be ways and there are several ways we will discuss later that could work. I am very hopeful despite the efforts that have gone unsuccessfully in the past. When you end up with the fifth election, the popular vote and Electoral College dont meet, perhaps the climate is right, people will be ready to make a change. I agree with ralph, constitutional amendment is not realistic or feasible. But the states can do something. All the power with those Electoral College votes are in the hands of the states. Most of the states turned them over to their Political Parties. I tried to call both parties to get a list of who voted on my behalf in the state of california and got put on hold and transfer it around and sent back to the secretary of state to which i said that is fine but you picked these electors. I would like to see the list of names of people who voted on my behalf. I could not get that list accept from wikipedia. The Republican Party has it posted. When i asked who are they . Did not answer my question. It is a hall of mirrors but doesnt have to be. If the voters are educated enough to see that they have ceded all their power in their state electoral votes to the Political Parties on their behalf they can take that power back and pass Ballot Initiatives and reforms that will make those votes more representative. For americans i dont think we can change our destiny. Im very hopeful. I have to note that i can tell you who these people are. These people are people you are absolutely certain will be faithful and will vote the way you want them to vote if you carry the state. I did that to test and pretend i was your average voter and wanted to know and got put on hold an awful lot. I agree with ralph that it is a virtual impossibility you would have a constitutional amendment to overturn the Electoral College but it is also important to take a step back and say why we havent Electoral College, this is one of many checks and balances which understands we are not america, we are the United States of america. If we are the United States of america there will be part of the system, two senators per state or the Electoral College that are not democratic and if your sense of that term. There are filters by which small states, smaller states and being part of this larger compact, the United States of america, the constitution, are seeking equal representation. There is something to be said for that proportional division of votes. To your point it would have to be a compact on those terms. I would not support the compact as related to what is known as the National Popular vote that you might have a state and it electors decide differently than its voters did even if that was different than the National Vote total. If you were able to pass a compact that incorporated this proportional representation then i could foresee if you set limits to get to 45 or 40 states that were going to sign on to it, california and texas would sign on to it, you could have something that i would be more representative. There are two things to note. One is that the Electoral College bears absolutely no resemblance in its functioning to what the founders intended. They did not design what we are using. They had three elections, we had at the beginning of this country, the first we do for George Washington and the second for john adams, where it worked as intended, which is to say the leading citizens of every state selected by the legislature got together and decided who they are not to be president. Aside from the legislature, votes by citizens, it was the point was it was an outside group that would select the president. That stopped after the third election and we ended up with Political Parties, you had jefferson versus adamant and from then on you had a totally different system which is now one where the electors are selected depending on popular vote in every state. Im not saying that is wrong but it is important to remember is that what we have was designed for a different system and a different country than where we are. That is point one. 2, i agree that despite that, everyone is now sufficiently invested in what we have a. Other reasons have arisen to retain it. The small states feel that they are overrepresented in the college compared to what they would be if it was the popular vote. You also have the country polarized on many issues, one of them has become the Electoral College versus the popular vote because there was nobody in the 20th century who was elected with winning by the Electoral College, the popular vote. We had two in the 21st century, george w. Bush and donald trump, one effect of that is that republican support for the Electoral College has risen because they like that results and they see the attack on it as an attack on the legitimacy of those elections. I i agree with the view that says we are not going to be able to get of the Electoral College by constitutional amendment. We are sufficiently polarized that that does not have a chance. However i believe we can still fix the Electoral College and there are two things i would do to fix it and i think those could be by constitutional amendment because i dont believe either would be controversial are seen as partisan. One is the problem referred to earlier, what is called a faithless elector which means the state goes for candidate x, the electors pledged to candidate x, vote, one of them doesnt vote for x. There was pressure this time on trump electors not to vote for trump. In the past there have been electors who cast protest votes or voted for a thirdparty candidate and ironically that is what the constitution says because it goes back to the idea of electors being wise citizens but it is the best we would be outraged as a country if faceless electors were to tip an election to the other side. My proposal would be to get rid of the electors. Leave the Electoral College but no reason to have 50 some people from california casting votes. California has x number of votes in the Electoral College, they shall automatically be considered cast for the winner of the popular vote in that state. You can do that statebystate, dont have to have physical electors who are a time bomb waiting to go off. The other which i personally think would be sufficiently supported by both parties to work would be the idea of proportional representation where you would say those votes cast by a state would be in proportion to citizens vote in that state. You run into these problems of what happens if some states join and some dont, if you had a constitutional amendment that said that you suddenly put all the state into play, california and texas are treated equally, democrats get votes out of texas, republicans get votes out of california. Seems to me that might be something that would solve an underlying political problem while leaving states with representation, that might be worth looking at. Ralph wants a brief comment and i have a quick follow up and we will move on. One point i want to wonderscore, someone who does not get the most votes doesnt get it. The other point with respect to the Electoral College we want to maximize citizen participation and we want candidates to campaign in all 50 states or as many as possible. As i was studying for this event i came across a startling statistic. In the 2016 president ial election, the general election, donald trump and hillary clinton, 70 of their Campaign Appearances were in six states. 94 of their Campaign Appearances were in 12 states. That means 40 states were ignored by the president ial candidates in the general election. That is not something we want to continue. We want to have them out in as many states as possible getting as many citizens as possible involved. Quick follow up i want to spend a lot of time on. It occurred to me when i thought of this electoral compact, if you have 270 people sign up to it they will vote for the winner of the popular vote, would you then to make sure you dont have people fooling around with the voting processes in various states in a close election, wouldnt you have to have some uniform federal standard for voting for president . Otherwise you could have an election like 2000 where Everybody Knows it is going to be very close and theres a huge incentive for people to try to cheat . That was what was supposed to happen with the help americans to vote act which was passed two years after the thousand election by voter role. So the implementation which was intended to be standardized on voting equipment and those things was not well enforced. You would agree you would have to have some on a National Level to make sure votes were honestly cast and counted. I wouldnt agree was necessary but i would support it because it is right. For whatever, 12 states in play now theres huge incentive already to play with those numbers. I dont is occurring. I think our election system is by and large not subject to fraud. It may be subject to incompetent as we found in florida in 2000, congress has worked since then to improve the voting system. One of three republicans in santa monica, the peoples republic of santa monica. One of the positive externalities whether it is proportional representation or looking at reform in the Electoral College, on president ial election cycles my vote doesnt count. The impact of that for a lot of people, i vote every way because that is what i do and a lot of people do but what happens in down ticket races under the president ial ticket, we dont yet know what that would mean. What would it mean for democrats in texas to understand your vote may have an impact at the top of the ticket and now youre going in and have 15 other things to vote for, how will it impact that . One of the things in california that is worth observing is we have a larger conversation about what is it going to take to get people to turn out his understanding and a lot of these landslide cases which if you look at the 216 election all the landslide states have the lowest voter turnout because people like me understood quite frankly there was no purpose casting a vote for president if i wasnt going to vote for the democratic nominee. The proportional idea of splitting the Electoral College votes radically changes had. Either of these would, quite interesting for example, the hispanic turnout in texas is pretty low. Democrats dont put as much effort as they might to get fat turnout up because they dont think will carry texas so that may change in the next eight years. If every vote counted people would put more effort into turning those folks out. Speaking of every vote counting or being counted and every voter being able to vote, back to adam for a minute. I am wondering if you need federal protections to encourage people to get people out to vote. Any prospect a lot like that can be passed in hyperpartisan era . What we have, Voting Rights laws already passed in the 60s to in sure that people can vote regardless of their race. That was the issue in the 60s where state attempting to discourage or prevent minorities from voting and that is an open battle today. Many people say that is what is happening, some of the Southern States that adopted these draconian, 1sided voter id measures, in texas for instance, you have to have photo id to vote and theres a list of what is an acceptable photo id and the legislature in its wisdom decided that a concealed weapon carry permit was a permissible voter id, but a photo id issued by the state of texas to with universitys students was not. That is designed, i want to make sure students vote at a lower rate, people who are nra members vote at a higher rate. That is a problem, not photo id per se but a system designed to discourage some blocks of voters from voting. Those are in federal courts, have been struck down a number of places. The answer to the question is we have laws that should ensure that people are treated equally, we just need to enforce those. You were involved in the Voting Rights act, i remember working with you on it. What do you think . Do we need a stronger Voting Rights act . That was the first issue we worked with with senator kennedy in 198182. Senator kennedys leadership was strong, the Voting Rights act was extended for 25 years and subsequently extended for a while in 2006. Strong Voting Rights act would happen, trevor did reference this a bit with respect to the Shelby County case and chief Justice John Roberts who was fighting us at the department of justice, the Voting Rights act, basically section 5 of the Voting Rights act with respect to the promise of justice jurisdiction over states that were covered because of the past history of discrimination against African Americans and latinos and others. There is legislation in the house and senate. Unfortunately i am pretty sure lisa murkowski, republican from alaska might be the only republican in the senate, representative from wisconsin, and absolute hero in 198182, the sponsors, you cannot pass legislation these days or anytime with two republican sponsors. I am not optimistic with respect to federal legislation to overturn the Supreme Court decision. The political dynamics have to change and we need a Massive Public education work on that so not in the short term. Anything else . I have a bit of an offthewall question. Theres something called ranked Choice Voting. Can you explain what it is and do you think it is a good idea . Ranked Choice Voting which is in ten cities affecting 2 million voters, is getting traction not just in ten cities in the state of maine with respect to congressional races what it is is, voters get to rank their candidates according to preference. Lets say there are four candidates in the general election and you rate them, 1234. Once someone of those four gets a majority of the first place votes, that person is the winner, a majority vote. Might get to a majority by having second or third preferences. This is how it works. What happens if there is not a majority . The person who finished last is eliminated and that persons second place votes are redistributed to the other three candidates. If you have a majority winner at the end of that ballot, that is it. The process continues of eliminating the last place finisher and redistributing votes. That is how you get to someone who has a majority of votes and get those electors. What is important is it encourages the candidates to be civil to one another, reach out not just to your base but you have got to be civil and much less negative advertising because you want to be the second choice of the people who vote for another candidate. It encourages pragmatic elected officials, people who will reach out to an expanded base, more civil, costs less. Theres a lot to be said about it. We have not taken a position that we are positioning ourselves for vigorous debate and my guess is there is going to be lots of support as people find out about this because it helps eliminate the polarization, extreme partisanship. It has a lot of merit and we are looking forward to it. It is interesting notion. It can be very confusing to the voter. Not just confusing. Just throw that out. That is a concern because you dont want to discourage voting. You want this to be easy to understand. Under this system i would have had to cast a vote for donald trump . No. But perhaps somebody like bloomberg would have gone in the race and more people would have picked him as number at 2. The positive aspect is you are voting for someone instead of against them which would be a positive way to look at it. The question is is it too overwhelming for the voter . In minnesota they interviewed people coming out, wasnt so bad. I would love to see a physical ballot and how it looks when you come out of the voting booth. This notion you are voting for someone is a positive it as opposed to voting against. Those are the pluses and minuses but it takes a lot of explaining. It does. With lot of these Electoral Reform issues there are things you can make a decision to move forward because you believe it is the right thing to do, most representative of an Election Results or other things youre doing to increase participation and what we are not seeing is a great uptick in participation. We are talking cities like oakland and others still looking at 30 participation in mayoral races, the question is how far down the ballot do you go . I am lucky if i know three of the five judicial appointments i have to vote on every cycle. It has been confusing but it is gaining momentum and we will see other municipalities experimenting with. Do you want to Say Something on that . We have another question for you i think adam will ask. The question that im looking forward to hearing the explanation because im trying to understand it, what do you do in a race where there is a republican or democratic candidate and that is it . The and you dont use it i take it . You would not have to. One of them will get a majority. The more likely in that situation, it encourages other people to run. Michael bloomberg in 2016, might very well have run. This is a really important vote. Among these panelists, it addresses the issue that you can vote for who you want to vote and not feel by casting a vote for bloomberg or some other in a normal election you are having the possibility of someone you really oppose being the beneficiary of your vote, the spoiler effect. This eliminates because in the end one person who gets a majority of the votes. Adam has a question for trevor and we will change the topic. Our political system is drowning in money. We see the super pacss spending numbers. Is this a good or bad thing that so much money in politics these days . All due respect, not as a criticism i will actually say that is the wrong question because it costs money to run, costs money to communicate, cost money to buy facebook or Television Time or consultants. We are spending a huge amount of money in elections, more than we used to spend. Republicans who oppose Campaign Finance reform will say we spend more buying popcorn or potato chips or something. That is why if you get sidetracked on his their too much money were too little and who is the government to tell you how much you can spend and so forth you end up in an unproductive conversation. The conversation needs to be a couple things. Where is this money coming from and how do officeholders, what do they have to do to get it . Is the system becoming corrupt . If so how do we fix it . Everybody needs money to communicate. Does that come from a tiny handful of donors . Does that come from a broad base of Popular Support . We used to have a public funding system for the president ial election. Ronald reagan won and won under that system. It is not anticonservative. That is gone now. We have reports members of congress are spending 40 of their working time fundraising, trying to figure out how to get enough money to run their campaigns and we have what you referenced which is the new world of super pacs where as a result of a couple Court Decisions including the Supreme Courts citizens united, we have ended up where instead of having contribution limits on what can be given to candidates and therefore spend we have a world with no contribution limits to these super pacs which are funded literally by a handful of people. If you look in the last election 70 , 80 of the money to the super pacs came from 100 americans and those become major players. It seems to me what we need to be looking at is how to diverse if i the funding, how to make officeholders candidates, officeholders less reliant on the whims of a couple rich people and instead find a way to finance those elections from a much broader base and provide alternative sources of money to compete with the millionaires. On trevors point where the money comes from i remember when i was running for office in 14, someone who never ran for office before, one of the things that was surprising was the difference between individual contributions and these associations and pacs that were involved. At one deck in the campaign we had a graphic up during the general election cycle in which we were able to show 80 of our funding had come from individuals and 20 from associations whereas my opponent 80 of the money was coming from associations and pacs and those kinds of organized fundraising groups, 20 from individuals. If we were to have this conversation before the 16 cycle it would be different, trump outraised everybody in this room, probably knows to the penny what the exact average donation was to Bernie Sanderss campaign, right . 27, right . Nobody had any qualms, i certainly didnt come with Bernie Sanders raising tens of millions of dollars but they were coming in 27 snippets. One of the things i propose during the campaign with even if we were to just report during the campaign, if the media were trained to report with every fundraising total, put in parentheses how much came from individuals and how much from associations or pacs, at least we would have better awareness where this money was coming from. Most of the people in this room are not familiar with something called the third house. The third house in sacramento if you are from california dominates the fundraising and Campaign Cash for any california legislative gubernatorial campaign. If you dont know that is where a lot of that money is coming from you really dont have a sense of who is pulling some of the levers politically in the state of california. There are some things we can do from a transparency and reporting perspective that people really wouldnt care if a candidate raised 100 million if it was in 27 amounts versus one candidate getting 80 million from a rather shadowy super pac and much smaller amount from individuals. Any prospect for Campaign Finance reform . I think theres a prospect at the National Level and the state level. These transparency and disclosure laws, if those would go into effect that would be enormously consequential and enforcement of existing laws, the former chair would be the first to not only acknowledge but make an emphatic point to enforce the laws. How do you get those 27 average donors . There are really good proposals whether it is tax credits or rebates, matching funds, a lot at the state level i think would facilitate the little person, the average person getting involved in a more significant way. The Bernie Sanders campaign would not be an exception to the role. We would have a local, state, National Leaders doing that in terms of what they would support. If i can add on the disclosure side it is important. What changed in these elections is we now have significant sums of money, hundreds of millions of dollars of money that is being spent without disclosure. Ever since the 1970s, the one guarantee is the money would be disclosed at the state level, the federal level, we now have groups that are not disclosing their donors because they say we are not political committees so we dont have to. We are under the tax code. Therefore, they are able to step in without anyone knowing who is doing the spending, they dont tell anyone they are paying for these ads so you see the ads and it says paid for by better america, no idea who that is. The latest iteration which came out this week and is very californiabased is the facebook scandal, the discovery by facebook that they were selling advertisements to russian front entities and they have announced that they have now found this, todays announcement was it was not just advertising but all sorts of meet up groups that were able to use the facebook apparatus to come up with protests over immigration and other issues. Foreign money is illegal in us elections but what we are being told her there is no disclosure of it. They never know. Facebook isnt telling us detailed and they are not showing us the ads that were paid for and watched. The estimate is up to 70 million americans would have seen these ads we are being told we cant see. So this whole disclosure issue is a really important one. I will turn this over to the audience but i want to go over one other issue. Redistricting in the form of gerrymandering seems to profoundly influence representation, balance of power, the electoral process. There is a case challenging gerrymandering before the Supreme Court out of wisconsin. The argument is is the case likely to be decided on a, quote, partyline vote of the Supreme Court justices . And if the court doesnt do anything, is it likely that more and more states might try to politicize redistricting as Arnold Schwarzenegger did in california . Short answer on the wisconsin case because that is the one brought my my group, the legal center in wisconsin, will argue before the court next month, that is a challenge to overly partisan what is called gerrymandering, drawing lines to Favor One Party and make sure the other doesnt get a majority. It has been illegal for some time to district lines to hurt minorities but it has not been considered unconstitutional to do so to hurt the other party. What you have is people in government ensuring their party maintains control by choosing their voters rather than the voters choosing the candidates. California has had reform, nonpartisan redistricting, the case out of wisconsin comes from a state legislature, in this case the Republican Party that did it but out of illinois, the democrats do exactly the same thing. In my view this is not a partisan issue. This is a basic government right issue, our right to be able to elect representatives without having those districts handpicked and drawn. Short answer in wisconsin is this was a republican gerrymander. They use computers and came up with the most Republican Legislature they could think of drying these lines and the resulting 2012 is 49 of voters in wisconsin voted for republicans and the legislature that was elected by that 49 was 60 republican so they got a result through gerrymandering that they did not get at the polls. If the game happens the other way in illinois, maryland, massachusetts has not had a republican congressman in 20 years. 30 of the state votes for republicans. This is a problem that i think needs to be addressed by the Supreme Court. Im hopeful it will not be a partyline vote, Justice Kennedy is the swing justice here and he has indicated he thinks overly partisan gerrymandering is wrong but he has said we need a test so that we are not being subjective when we look at it. Our goal in the wisconsin case is to say there is a test, the numbers i have described are an example how you can prove this was overly partisan. This case will be argued in october and next spring and im hopeful we will change the standard nationwide. Anyone else on this . The Redistricting Commission does show a way. It is something i am supportive of. It wasnt nonpartisan, it was multipartisan. So members, every day california citizens thousand of whom applied to be on the commission were divided by republicans, democrats, Party Preference so there was equal representation, even more so than party registration. More equal representation for someone like myself as a republican on the Redistricting Commission than you would find elsewhere or the legislature. That has withstood many Court Challenges and the maps we are using today does provide a model for other states. I would add when looking at Electoral Reform in maine and nebraska the Congressional District model begs for more gerrymandering so when looking at various reforms the Congressional District model and gerrymandering is fixed will only continue to breed a gaming of the system so to get to the point of eliminating the people eliminating with the numbers you could sidestep the gm entering, i dont know if you will ever completely get away from it but that is one way of getting around it. Point of personal privilege having been a citizen in massachusetts, ralph knows this too, gave the republicans complete control of legislature and governorship, they still cannot gerrymander the state, republicans tend to be evenly spread across the state. We are looking for bipartisanship but in the last month there has been significant partisanship on automatic Voter Registration, and your case it is important to acknowledge what you have done in terms of republican senators, governors, republican governors and congress, john mccain, a conservative, nancy pelosi, liberal, and the chairman of the House Freedom caucus, one of the most conservative members of the house of representatives all find on in support of your position. They do something to acknowledge and applaud and hopefully get more of it. We have a tradition which is upheld, we turn this over for the last 15 minutes to the audience so anybody has a question please raise your hands. Because of the light i cant see very well but someone here has a microphone, okay. Hi, folks. My question for you is you are talking a lot about how elections are run. If you do all those kind of changes to rules, in your fantasy world, the ideal situation you would see, would it change Voter Participation rate from 20 , 30 , 40 to 80 or 90 and if not how do you get to 80 or 90 you are we talking about rules or something bigger . How do we address bigger things . I would jump and say if you get rid of winner take all you will have more Voter Participation. California is a perfect example. Many democrats never bothered to go to the polls. A lot of republicans didnt bother saying is true in texas and oklahoma. Of people thought they had a shot at being somewhat represented, you have 12 states where neither candidate got 50 but they got 100 of the electoral vote, that is not representative. We have a representative form of government and anytime someone doesnt get 50 they get 100 of the Electoral College, Everybody Knows it is not right. The number one Voter Suppression is winner take all for sure and i would venture to guess people would be fighting tooth and nail to get a chance to vote if they thought it matters more. Voter registration a few minutes ago, hoping it would come as a question from the audience. If we have automatic Voter Registration which means when you go to the department of Motor Vehicles you can be automatically registered or federal, state agency, 50 million more americans will be registered with automatic Voter Registration. Ten state in the last two years as recently as august, the other bipartisan suggest by the governor of illinois, signed into law this past unanimously in illinois, automatic Voter Registration. That is number one. Never 2, it would be nice to get those tens of millions of americans who are independent able to vote in primaries, we got to figure out a way to preserve the party system but also get people who are going to be affected by those nominees involved in the primaries somehow. Thirdly, how about Voter Participation holiday . Maybe it is veterans day. Every time there is a president ial election there is a federal holiday but we dont have to create a new one. Veterans day is within a week or so of the vote. That is the convenience of voting. How do you make it easy for people not just Voter Suppression but incentive to be able to vote and giving people time to vote and making it easy to register, that would make a difference in getting that 60 , 70 , 80 overtime. I was ready to agree with you on everything tonight but i have to push back a little. Many of these levers that can improve registration dont improve voter turnout. Those are two different things. Medical science research, eric mcgee of the Public Policy institute, his research into thousand 14 looking at some of these measures to increase turnout whether it is sameday registration or extending the period absentee ballots can be submitted or extending the period from election day earlier to which votes can be cast and an array of these measures looking at 1 , 2 , 3 effective. The bigger issues you are talking about, think about president ial election years whether the votes of people in landslide winner take all states will have an impact, that can play a role in changing voter turnout but i also think there is a bigger issue being dictated by the number of especially millennials were not registering for either party and are registering their Party Preference and in that, you affect demographic and overall no Party Preference voters, voters the turnout at lower levels and party registered voters and those two things together to me speak to a bigger problem of the soul of the voter. Making these two, three, 4 changes and losing sight of this 4050 large group of eligible voters who i think in many ways are voting with their feet. Another question. Thank you. My name is michelle. Im proud to serve on the board and i worked during the days to try to instill the importance of voting to young people while theyre still in school. Unfortunately that hearing a lot that is something our case but in thing about Election Night when w were all glued to the tv and result startling and and often results, and so loud and strong before us west coasters close their polls. Then theres white and alaska. Do you think theres any effect on voter turnout . We can address that as someone who worked at it networking with a lot of criticism i coupled in front of congress to discuss that issue because during the Reagan Carter raced it was over before californian polls were even closeclose and they had called e election. What they do now is they put them in a decision room. The doors are closed. No one is supposed to know what their modeling is showing as the district and precinct coming. They will never call an election before the last poll has closed in hawaii. Thats the rule. However, as the tallies coming you sense the momentum. With a close election where people are still waiting on michigan like they were this time around, pennsylvania, of the states, its more of the cliffhanger, i dont know if that affects the west coast so much. There is very little you could watch the polls close in the state to tell them they can report those numbers. They will no longer call those elections. In 2000, another issue where florida was called and then pulled back. Those decisions are supposed to be kept sequestered from the anchors. They have done things from a standpoint to try to avoid it but it is very difficult to do. The exit polling comes out and those are not supposed to be leaked until the polls close. A lot of that information does get out. I dont know whether it suppresses votes necessarily rs people just say why bother . It sort of over. At least that calling it until the last poll is close does altamont. Im not sure the hawaiialaska standard from my experience another question, hopefully from a student. My name is katie, im a sophomore, a student here at usc. The comment about the media get me thinking. Do you think these issues such as electroforming gerrymandering got more Media Coverage like theyre not as sexy or exciting as breaking news alert enacted a thing but if they did and people come unvested in these issues and saw the impact that this type of Voter Suppression has on like their daytoday lives, do you think that could help fuel legislative motion indicating your ideas into place quicker . I do. I think the media will only Pay Attention if it truly noisy and loud. I think the voters have to be very noisy and loud and say they are fed up. Look at all the free media donald trump got in this election. He didnt have to buy any ads because they go to the noise. I did not mean to disparage my fellow journalists but i also know cnn never made more money in the life than they did. The first time theyve been in the black in a really long time. It has to be a grassroots effort, and like bernie and the 27 voter. I cut everybody by surprise. It was very exciting. There was momentum. It has to start with the voters saying they that enough. People are apathetic in the low voter turnout is part of the problem. People have got to get angry. I would say does demand somebody on the inside of the system pushing the issue. If you look back at the history of the citizens Redistricting Commission in california was led by governor schwarzenegger. The phrase our member governor schwarzenegger sang so many times on the campaign trail while he was campaigning for the proposition in the past, which was were supposed to be the ones voters picking our politicians, not politicians taking our voters. He was able to distill what was a very complex ballot measure. If you look at the way the citizens Redistricting Commission was put together and have people applied and how they were vetted and all those things, very complex. But when governor schwarzenegger was able to distill down to that simple populist message, which is are we the want to get to pick our politicians rather than they choosing us . It really did win the day. A simple populist message driven by somebody on the inside is loud enough to get the press attention and it can change the way we do things. I would agree. I think strong, visible leadership on any of these issues is the ticket to success. You cant sit here and say the press should cover this more or that more. Those of us who were in the field spent our days trying to figure out ways to get press attention or how to explain the story in a way that is nontraditional or use nontraditional social media to explain what is at stake in what the issues are. But certainly if youre going to try to push for change, whether its Electoral College change for campaignfinance, i think youve got to somebody like governor schwarzenegger who by the way has been very strong nationally on this issue. But you have to have someone like that in the congress or in the states to raise it up to a level of visibility so that people hear about it. As the gospels say the first shall be last. Do you have a comment . I want to make the point not just about nonpartisanship or bipartisanship but what youve written the last few minutes has got to be in the states. In the beginning it is important of National Leadership and state leadership. We have to all of us build an election reform movement. We have to organize in the states and explain to people whats at stake. I think about the spirit of houston and texas and louisiana over the last couple of weeks in response to the hurricanes, a people of all colors and political persuasions and create working together in a common purpose. Thats what we need with respect to an election reform movement. We are a resilient and great nation. We can take on this challenge when people understand our democracy is truly at stake. I have to have one last comment in terms of what youre saying. The president , one of the networks observed during 2016, donald trump not be good for america but he is very, very good for my bottom line. So i think these issues of opening up the process, of getting more people to vote will actually, if we can ever get there, well actually give us better results. I dont mean democratic result of republican results, the better results across the board if more people participate. Thats the idea of democracy. I want to thank ralph, leslie, pete, trevor, adam, my comoderator, and i want to mostly thank the students at usc who are engaged, interested, stimulating, terrific people. And i like being a teacher here very much. I also want to thank the staff of the Unruh Institute which does a fabulous job week after week. We will see you here next week to talk about the shrinking middle class. Thanks everybody. [applause] [inaudible conversations] coming this morning, marine corps general and chair of the joint chiefs of staff Joseph Dunford visits capitol hill to testify before the Senate Armed Services committee. Hes up for second term leading the joint chiefs. We are there live at 10 a. M. Eastern on cspan3. Later, James Clapper talks about his career in the Intelligence Community from George Washington university. We live at 6 p. M. Eastern on cspan3, online at cspan. Org, and streaming on the free cspan radio app. There is no law that dictates impeachment. What the constitution says is high crimes and misdemeanors and we designed that. Bill clinton got impeached because he lied. Here you have the president who i can tell you and continue his inclusion with the russians to undermine our democracy. Here you have a president who has obstructed justice and here you have a president that lies every day. Thank god that the special counsel is beginning to connect the dots and understand facebook role in it, social medias role in it. When is the black Committee Going to say impeachment. Its time to go after him. I dont hear you. Dont another person come up to me its a you go girl. No, you go. [cheers and applause] for the past 30 years the Video Library is your free resource for politics, congress and washington public affairs. Whether it happened 30 years ago or 30 minutes ago, find it in cspans Video Library at cspan. Org. Cspan, where history unfold daily. Now bill bratton of the former newark City Police Commissioner and Los Angeles Police chief on the challenges and successes of Community Policing around the country. Posted by the Heritage Foundation this runs one hour and 45 minutes. Good morning