The efforts around the country to combat election tampering. On behalf of town hall seattle and the american constitution society, its a pleasure to welcome you to tonights live stream presentation with the author david daley in conversation with krist novoselic. I want to acknowledge that when we are at our homes in seattle, that institution stands on the the [inaudible] and we thank them for our continuing use of the Natural Resources of their an access e central homeland. Ancestral homeland. Were thrilled to present virtually in the midst of the concerns around Public Health. Town halls a place where we can share and sustain ideas and creativity even when we cant gather together in person, and i want to thank krist and david for appealer tonight. Town halls pursuing option to produce more content, and many of our past programs are available on our Digital Media library, so stay in touch with us in the coming weeks. 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You can to that on line or by texting the words town hall to number 44323. Thanks 44321. Our booksellers have been hit and can use your support as well, and if youre interested in supporting local independent bookstores and dade, of course, by and david, of course, by purchasing a copy of his book tonight, third place books will have copies for sale that will also feature signed bookplates, and theyre offering free shipping. Theyre the best place to purchase your book. We hope you will. You know, if i had been able to get to the green room, as they call it tonight, i would know exactly how long theyre intending to speak tonight, but typically we ask for something in the 3040 minute range, so well just say theyll talk for as long as a it takes. Oured moderator tonight will collect questions for those submitted in the ask a question field at the bottom of your screen. You can also vote on which questions our speaker will answer first. We cannot guarantee the speakers will address every question, well get to as many as possible, and keep your questions concise and in the form of a question. Town halls work is made possible through your support and the support of our sponsors, the Real Networks foundation. You know, this is long when i deliver this thing in person, but it is interminable, so thank you the, the everyone, for suffering with me now. So our civic series is supported by Real Networks foundation, kow and the. [inaudible] but, of course, as all of i you who are town hall members know, we truly are a membership, about 6,000 of you who keep this place strong year in, year out. I want to encourage those of you who care about town hall and its mission to join us as well. Okay. David daley is the author of, you know, rats f if uc fuck, can i say that on the radio . At any rate, the true story behind the plan to steal american democracy. Frequent lecturer in media source about the topic, he is the former editorinchief of salon. Com and the former ceo and publisher of the connecticut news project. Hes a Digital Media fellow at the Wilson Center for the human i thinks and the grady school of journalism at the university of georgia. His work has appeared in publications as well as appearance as a correspondent on cnn and npr. He helps identify the deep throat source for bob woodward and karl bernstein. You know, if i was writing this myself, i might have tucked that in a little earlier, not buried the lead there. At any rate, chris krist novoses a Founding Member of the group anywhere van that. His first book, grunge and government lets fix this broken democracy, features his musical path as well as his support of Electoral Reform and his belief in the need to clean up politics overall. Daleys book unrigged how americans are battling back to save democracy, is the subject of tonights timely talk. Please join me in welcoming david deal hi and krist novoselic. Hello, everybody. Thank you, that was great. Thanks, wi e er. It is thanks, everybody, for tuning into the town hall, and i hope everybody is happy and sane and healthy during this pandemic. Just, you know, do the best you can, and we should make it through this. And so david daley here, my colleague i met through fair vote, he has a new book called unrigged how americans are fighting back to save our democracy. 9 and so tonights conversation is going to be about gerrymandering where political insiders, pretty political elites, they draw district lineses for singlemember districts to benefit themselves and their Political Parties. You know the horror stories, and dave could touch on. Thats and so were going to talk about gerrymandering, and were also going propose some solutions, mainly proportional representation, a type of voting. So his new book is out, so ill turn it over to you. And so lets hear, lets hear it, dave. Well, thanks, kri is st. Krist. I am really sorry to not be out there with everyone tonight. Again, i hope youre all safe and sane. We stand together with your doctors, your nurses, your grocery stores, essential workers who are so carefully doing their jobs for all the rest of us. Thank everyone at town hall and third place for selling books tonight, the american constitution society, our friends at fair vote washington, everybody could use your help and support, these amazing bookstores and terrific activist groups, so get involved during these difficult days. We could also, i think, use some optimism and use some hope. And this new book, unrigged, it really began with a quest for hope. Like mentioned in the introduction, i had written this book called rat fucked. If youre going to write a book about entirely handerring, it pretty much generally handerring, it has to have a memorable title. The republican strategy in 2010 to win the legislature in places like North Carolina, michigan, wisconsin, pennsylvania, just ahead of the redistricting year of 2011. We draw all these lines again as soon as the census numbers arrive to try do account for population. Equality in the all these states. And then they use those singlemember districts, and they redrew them with this powerful mapmaking software, these amazing new data sets that really made it possible to just go up and down the streets and socially choose their own voters and to kind of hot wire our democracy itself. At this point its kind of an amazing number. Theres 59 million americans, that is almost 1 in 5 of us, that live in a state where one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that won fewer votes in 2018. 1 in 5. And then on november 8, 2016, you had three of those theirly handerred states, each gerrymandered states each of which admits its more difficult for people to vote in really specific ways, and they handed donald trump the Electoral College. And americans woke up the next day to sort of this deeply divided country, closely divided country. But all the political power was sitting on one side in washington and at the supreme court. 70 of legislatures nationwide. It was all concentrated on one side. And its not a partisan argument. Simply, you know, bad for Representative Democracy when a majority of voters are consistently unable to win a majority of states, right . And you had this toxic combination of singlemember districts, gerrymandering kind of closely followed by these Voter Suppression laws that had been passed by these unaccountable legislatures. It really tied our democracy into this to foundly unfair, you know, double knot and had established this nearly unbeatable minority rule in competitive places. It was kind of hard to see a solution for this crisis that, you know, i thought had contributed so deeply to the extremism and the sort of sense of hopelessness that plagued so much of our politics. Id go ahead and talk about this last book and sometimes feel like i had a dark rain cloud over my head. I wanted to get rid of that. And one day i saw a Facebook Post by a michigan woman named katie takegy, and katie has an amazing story. On Election Night 2016, she leaves her job working at a recycling nonprofit in grand rapids, michigan, she puts on her best red pantsuit, and she flies to new york for Hillary Clintons victory party. Well, the night did not exactly go as katie had planned. And she gets home and shes getting ready to go to work that next morning, and she is already sort of terrified of what thanksgivings going to bring at her house. Bernie supporters in her house, theres trump supporters, theres disappointed hillary backers, and shes already just imagining, you know, mashed potatoes and turkey and gravy flying across the table. So she takes to social immediate e what, and she writes i want to take on gerrymandering in michigan. If you want to do that as well, join me here. And she adds a smiley face e emoji at the end of all this. It really severed the connection between the ballot box and the popular will in michigan, and yet nobody had been able to do anything about it for the entire decade. That post by a 27yearold pioneers this winning redistricting revolution in a state that no one thought it could happen. That post ends up martialing 4,000 volunteers. Together they go out and they collect 430,000 signatures, they make it on the ballot. Its the first time this michigan that this has happened without having to go out and pay collectors to go out and do it. And then they won in november 2018. They beat back Koch Brothers money and devos money and the u. S. Chamber of commerce money that was set against this many. 62 of the state agreed with them, theyre going to have an independent commission drawing the lines in michigan in 2021. It wasnt long will be after that, that i met desmond mead who had taken on the really difficult tax of returning Voting Rights to 1. 7 million former felons in florida who had essentially lost their civic voice forever along with that conviction even after they had served their time. It was really just this cruel vestige of the jim crow south, and it ensnared about 10 of all the adults in the state, 25 of all the black men in the 25 of the black men in the state. And mead knew that pain well because he was one of them. A drug addiction and depression had led to a felony weapons charge. One afternoon after his release hes homeless, hes still struggle with drugs. He stands before the Railway Tracks in the miami, and he is just waiting for the next train to come, except the train that afternoon for whatever reason doesnt arrive. He walks across those tracks instead. Its as if he says to me he was guided by some kind of power, and he actually finds himself outside a drug treatment center, checks himself in, turns his life around. He returns to college, earns a law degree, but it doesnt matter because the one thing you cant do in florida no matter what is earn back that right the vote. So he becomes the director of the florida rights restoration commission. He builds this amazing coalition that unites black and white, democrats and republicans, excons and second chancebelieving churchgoers, tattooed, trumploving deplorables and radical criminal justice reformers into this mighty moral coalition. This was actually funded by the Koch Brothers and the aclu at the same time. And on election day 2018, even as florida elects a republican governor, republican u. S. Senator and two really close races, a big majority, a supermajority, 64 of the vote there, back restoring these Voting Rights in a constitutional amendment. All of these peopled had stood up and voted for fairness. And i was, i was really inspired by these stories. Just the way that they sort of triumphed over this sense of despair in our politics. I was pretty sure that we didnt need another book about how democracy dies, and what i wanted to do was set out and join the quiet revolutionaries who seemed to me to be reenvision rating our civic reinvigorating our is civic fabric at the time that really we needed it most. It didnt matter if these barriers were high, if they were stout, they were willing to take them on. So i joined those canvassers across michigan with voters and politicians, utah and missouri where activists also won two big campaigns against gerrymandering, watched native americans across the red rock deserts of utah, the tribal lands of north dakota mount these desperate, heroic pushes to determine their street addresses and make themselves ids to preserve their voices against a surgicallyfocused voter id bill. I to rode the medicaid express, this rickety green rv across idaho with these activists who didnt understand why their legislature wouldnt take the obamacare money back from the federal government to insure that 70,000 of their neighbors had health insurance. Alabama where the state legislature finally, urn court order under court order, returned Voting Rights denied to tens of thousands of former prisoners there. But they wouldnt do anything to actually sign these folks up and get them back on the rolls. We went door to door, bus station to barbershop with concerned citizens who were determined to add these folks, their neighbors, back to the voting rolls. They won, they won big, they won everywhere, and it was just amazing to watch. It was like this time in which the news cycle feeds your exhaustion. I was able to go out and spend opinion a year sort of ride spend a year with sort of ruing along with these people who had turned off twitter and, you know, stopped watching msnbc, and they went out and they just got to work. In idaho the Medicaid Expansion initiative began there of after these two recent graduates from a high school at sand point, you know, withdraw up north in idaho way up north in idaho, they were now studying medicine and history, but they realized that they might have organization schools that would help a school levy pass in their town that was up against this bitter, wellfunded opposition. They came back to sand point, they organized there, they won and they were sort of hungry for more. They decided they would take on health care in idaho as their issue, and they painted that 40yearold r. V. They took it from corner to corner of idaho collecting signatures. And in this oneparty state thats as red as taylor swifts lipstick, they captured 61 of the vote the oldfashioned way. They knocked on their neighbors doors, they talked to them, they persuaded them. I joined them in idaho falls in this amazing moment where we sort of walk up this driveway. In the parking lot theres a car that has a Bumper Sticker on it that says vietnam we were winning when i left. Im thinking maybe we should move on and knock on the door down there [laughter] you know, this one might not be a very good bet. But the man inside comes to the door and says oh, yeah, you know, i know exactly what youre talking about. My wife falls in that gap, my daughter all falls into that gap, im completely with you. Just by talking to folks, you know, you just got the sense that maybe we were not as polarized as we, as we would have been or as people, you know, like to say we are. There was, you know, powerful stories to watch in north dakota as well which is a state that has such clean elections they dont even bother requiring a Voter Registration there. But in 2013 right after the native american vote helped catapult Heidi Heitkamp into the u. S. Senate, legislate to haves there decided to pass this law which mandated a street address, sort of the one thing they knew didnt exist in the tribal lands. The tribes were able to knock this back in court, but the legislature would keep coming at it every single time a court would order it go away, the legislature would come back and refine it and try again. Finally in 2018 just before election day, they got a judge that okayed it, and the voter id restrictions were able to go into law. And these tribes, they just got to work. They got in touch with professors and academics and experts in mapping, and they did all this sophisticateed gis work to nail down addresses for all of the homes of the tribal land, and then they printed ids. They burned the machine out, they made so many. Turnout soared. It was wild. And one of the big wins that night, the first native American Woman ever elected to the legislature in north dakota defeats the man who first proposed the voter id bill in 2013. So it was, it was put amazing Pretty Amazing to see. And you just, you see this happening all over the country. I watched it in maine, home to this rich tradition of independent candidates where citizens demanded a Voting System that allowed them to rank all of their choices and avoid a plurality winner that most people opposed. And then both parties there stood in the way, long winter petition strives not once, i drives not once, but twice and won. These people did not wait for the supreme court, they did not wait for a superhero president ial candidate. They stood up, they acted, they became the protecters of democracy that i think we all imagine the courts to be. You know, we might actually want our representatives to be. And some of these victories have been pushed back on, you know, state legislatures have not embraced them all. Theyve fought them. But i think its important to kind of