My name is desiree. Im with the san marco bookstore. I want thank you guys for coming out tonight. I did for your first hear about this book in january when i was reviewing the summer catalog with my Penguin Random house rep. And it seemed like an interesting topic. And when i saw that dr. Seabrook was from usf, i thought well, i think that would be great. Lets do an event. They were thrilled. They 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 dont 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 enlighten and educate us. For those of you who have not had a chance to scan you on fs faculty page. Please let me introduce dr. Seabrook, a professor and interim chair, the department of Political Science and Public Administration at the university of north florida. His Research Examines the intersection of law and politics in the United States. With a particular focus on redistrict reform and election administration, he is the author of the book drawing the lines constraints on gerrymandering in u. S. Politics, which was published. 2017 as well as the featured title the evening one person, one vote a surprising history of gerrymandering in america. Arco conversationalist. This evening is nate monroe of the Florida Timesunion. He has been a metro columnist for the Florida Times union since 2019, and before that he was a beat and Investigative Reporter on covering that focused on covering jacksonville city hall, which is the largest municipal government in florida, and driving to arriving prior to in jacksonville in 2013. Nate was a reporter for the newspapers in the florida panhandle, south louisiana, where wrote about hurricanes small town corruption, oil spills, army corps screw ups, mardi gras and bingo nights at the Senior Citizen center. Following the conversation between dr. Seabrook and mr. Monroe, we will be doing a q a session. As i mentioned, we do have cspan with us this evening and they will be recording the proceedings. When you are ready to ask question, if you will line up at one of the side mikes and, wait so everyone can hear you and, please dont forget to stop by the bookstore and let us know if youd like to attend events like this. Again, i thank you. Have a good evening. Okay. Thank you very much. Theres your hand to sign local books for hosting this event tonight. And thank you all for coming out. This is the second event that ive had on my book tour for one person, one vote, and at the first event, which was in portland, and on friday night, there were four people in the audience. So on, and they were actually outnumbered by my wife and the bookstore employees who were required to be there. So i can only assume from that fact that almost of you are here to see nate tonight. So i certainly i certainly appreciate him being here to juice my attendance numbers. Yeah, of course. So i think perhaps the best way to begin is to kind of give you quick definition. An example of what it is that we mean by gerrymandering because its 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 its one of those things that they kind of throw into the bucket or the category of kind of bad democracy. I think its one of those elements of our government that is dysfunctional, that obstructs the translation of the peoples preferences into, government policy. But its also something that is is kind of complex and and complicated to it. And i want to begin with quote, actually, and im going to read from my cheat sheet here just to make sure that i get it right, because this is the quote that i open the book with. And i think its probably best and most succinct summary of what gerrymandering is that that ive encountered. And this is a quote by, a guy by the name of Thomas Hoffler, tom Thomas Hoffler was a republican political strategist, who basically no one had ever heard of until after he died in 2018. And 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 american politics through, gerrymandering and, he said, quote, redistricting is like an election in reverse. Usually the voters get to pick the politician in redistricting. The politicians get to pick the voters. And that, i think, is perhaps the best way to summarize what it is that were talking about tonight. Yes, i think that all of us can feel from time to time, like we dont have as much control as we would like of the political process, even though were voters. How many times have you showed up to the ballot box and reviled every choice that you had . I think that redistricting explains lot of this kind of lack of agency that voters feel. And its its its a deliberate thing. Redistricting gives the people in power a lot of power to determine their own future, to determine the futures of their chosen successors. And we see this on every level. I expect well talk tonight, maybe even about City Councils recent redistricting process and certainly the the state of florida has struggled with this for a long time. Yeah. And i think hits on really what is the the core of the problem with gerrymandering its that it removes this choice from the voters it removes ability to hold their government accountable and a lot of the things that we see in our government, the gridlock, the corruption, politics is pursuing their own selfish interests rather than the the interests of their constituents, from the fact that they know they will not be held accountable in any meaningful way for what they do while. Theyre in office and. Gerrymandering is a big part of that because it involves taking elections that might previously been competitive, elections where plausibly either democrats or republicans 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, either democrats or republicans and when that happens, there is no meaningful choice for the people who live in those districts, particularly if youre one of the unfortunate voters who finds yourself as a democrat in a heavily republican seat or a republican in a in a heavily democratic seat and when that occurs, it really shifts the entire focus to the entire selection process, to the primary election, whether its the republican primary or the democratic primary. And the people who vote in primaries tend to be more 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 election anyway. And you just have to look at some of the characters who are representing various districts in the house to represent states right now to to kind of see that that process in action. I wont name any names, but pretty sure you know who they are. I can name names, you know, of the interesting things in that i took away from your book. And that, i think is a really important point. We talk about redistricting and of how things have gotten as bad as they have is that like a lot of criminality, a lot of behavior, redistricting has adapted over time as our understanding what sort of priorities a policymaker is ought to have in mind when they draw districts have changed as the courts have in the past sort tried to control or kind of set some rules for whats whats allowed. Although there hasnt been much of that. And as hard, like our data tools and our mapping have improved, the politicians have adapted to that and theyve come with more insidious ways of preserving their own power. And i think thats a really important theme in your book. I also think an important theme 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, particularly because of the tenor of our national discourse. I think theres an assumption that redistricting happens when like one Party Controls all the levers of government. But in reality, there is something 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, 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, by academics and so 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 not only as old as the United States itself, it is in fact older than the United States itself. It has its origins in a somewhat quirky practice in british politics, known as the rotten borough and rotten boroughs, were the ways, one of the ways that kind of british, irish autocrats traditionally are used, the arrangements of government to to maintain their stranglehold on power and involved essentially controlling the number of people who would get to vote in the district. And so you could potentially have a seat in parliament that had 500 or 1000 People Living in it and three or four of them were actually eligible to vote. And the landowner or the nobleman would bribe or often offer patronage to those voters in order keep control of the seat. And we saw similar, um, translated across to the United States during, the colonial era and these kind of early gerrymanders, whether they were prior to independence or hosting, dont really look a whole lot like gerrymandering as we imagine it today. The image of gerrymandering kind of conjures up the specter of these and misshapen districts that you see on maps. Sometimes forms. But as nate was saying, its only the its only the technology that is available to. Politicians today. And it was not until. 1970s that computers and software were used for the first time in the redistricting process and it was really not until the 20 tens that sophisticated algorithms and simulations began to enter the scene and what these allow the redistricting to do is not only draw districts based on what has happened in prior elections. So you can draw a seat that the way you can figure it. Okay. It looks like this seat has voted republican in for the last two or three cycles. If we draw the district way, were pretty confident that it will vote republican moving forward. This was kind of historically how gerrymander during was done. They would look at the census numbers. They look at how people had voted in prior elections and they would kind of extrapolate into the future. And oftentimes 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 entire decade or even longer. But what happens today is that they have these models by which they can simulate how districts they draw will perform under a wide variety, 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 u. S. States that are, for all intents purposes, purposes, no really democracies in terms of their legislative elections and. The example i begin the book with and i think its one of the most glaring ones the state of wisconsin. After the 2010 election. The Republican Party controlled State Government in the state of wisconsin. And they drew what consider to be one of the most severe gerrymander orders in american history. And as a result of the Republican Party has control of around about two thirds of the seats in 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 maintained control of two thirds of the seats and. Thats what gerrymandering can do, can render essentially an entire state no longer meaningfully a democracy. An entire decade. Another consequence of that is after the most recent census. Yes. Who was control . In control . Redistricting again in wisconsin. It was the same republicans who had gerrymandered it a decade ago. And thats what really concerns me moving forward that gerrymandering is not just going to be something that allows politicians to put their thumbs on the scale for a couple of elections. Its going to be something that a Political Party to essentially a one party state and use gerrymandering decade after decade to kind exclude their opponents from the political process entirely. It was not shocking at all. See in this book that redistricting like almost every other Malevolent Force the world today, is uniquely american. Like we took something from from britain which knew correct me if im wrong, but i mean, the redistricting thing that was sort of the ancestor of what we have today was like more like mal apportionment, just kind of a passive, not changing boundaries as population has shifted over time to something that is like incredibly proactive. This regime of, of like Data Analysis that youre describing i mean, there are i mean, this is an effort to take peoples voice and vote away today and into the future and. You know, its its incredibly effective. Its i mean, really, its worth considering that, you know, in florida, the legislature in the not this latest round but in the in the 20 tens, the redistricting process then its 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 a 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 they deleted records shortly after. Redistricting was done even though they knew they should have been public as a matter of law. But they also knew there would be litigation filed and that would destroy important discovery. You know, these the stakes like the stakes are quite literally the control of of our democracy and all of our little is in our states and in our cities. I you know, i was i was really interested. I had no idea about the history of it. And i had no idea it was it was as old as you described. And you know. I just think, like, maybe we can maybe we can run through like i feel you should explain the donald peeing on a turkey for the crowd because thats a thing in the book. Yeah, 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, um, theres kind of a game that, that those who are in the business of analyzing and 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 look more like the thing than than on other occasions. But there are a couple from the state of, new york, that i talk about in in the book, one from the 1990s and one from the 2000s, the first one is a district in Central New York state. Kind of a big island in the middle of upstate new york, that if look at it, i resembles almost to an uncanny level an image of Abraham Lincoln riding on a vacuum cleaner. I have pictures of, all of these in the book. So you can take a look for yourself. But i can testify that it is remarkable all the way down to the hat. And then theres another district from a decade later which is a district that kind of runs up and down the Hudson Valley north of new york city and my nickname for this district was, donald trump urinating on a small turkey. And you can you can see this if you if you read the book. I you may not want to see and you will certainly never be able to unsee it, but that is what the district resembles in real. Like hes not hes not bsing, you theres theres one other district that i that i write about in the book as well. And this one is kind of interesting because if you go historically a lot times the districts were drawn in a way where not all of the parts of them were physically to one another. This is what is known as contiguity the idea. And this is actually now requirement under federal law that districts have to be contiguous that all of the physical of the district have to be actually geographically connected to another and theres one major exception to this, which is that districts are allowed to cross directly over a body of water. So a river like Something Like that because otherwise its its physically impossible to to divide a state districts if you dont have the ability to cross those water features. And so back in the 1980s, there was a congressman from california and his name was phil burton. And i kind of credit him the book as being kind of the one of the inventors of the the modern gerrymander, the type of gerrymander that relies not so much on mal apportionment or having very different population between between districts in a state. Um, the title of the book one person one vote comes from the series of Court Decisions in the 1960s that require id under the constitution. All districts to have e