Theyre responding to their voters in remaining silent on some of this and so those of us who disagree with need to raise our voices. Anybody else. We only have we have only minutes so we can off a little early. Thank you so very much. Coming. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for reading and and for your obvious support for these families. Nick seabrook book wrote this book. One person, one vote, which is a history of and im going to get this right, gary meandering is the first time ive ever said that and gotten it right hard. G everybody just so you know, nicks going to teach us much than just how to pronounce the word he is looked into something that affects us all in so many more ways than we ever thought possible. It is something that has affected us for and hundreds of years and think that all of us standing are sitting in this room, have expressly here in wisconsin over the past couple of years. These are the types of events that make me just like so proud to be able to go a microphone over to somebody and im going to hand it over to nick seabrook. Ladies and gentlemen. Well, thank you, everybody. The warm wisconsin welcome this is actually my first time. Both madison and in the state of wisconsin. And given that the state is famous for two of my favorite things in the world beer and cheese. I have a that im going to enjoy my time here the beer and cheese after the speaking engagements its very important to get those in the correct order. Unfortunately, however, wisconsin is also famous, or perhaps i should say, infamous for Something Else and. That is the topic of. My new book, one person one vote a surprising history of gerrymandering or to give it its original all historical pronunciation gerrymandering in america whenever i talk about the topic of gerrymandering, one of the most frequent questions that i get asked by and interviewers is which the most gerrymandered state in, america and today, for the first time i can say while standing in that state for the last 12 or 12 years or so the the answer to that question has been the state of wisconsin, my home state, florida certainly gets an honorable particularly under the recent leadership of ron desantis. You can also point to of blue states weve seen particularly bad gerrymandering in recent years, states like new york and illinois are examples of something that, i think is a broad, important theme. The book, which is that gerrymandering, the manipulation often of election districts, political gain is a republican problem or a democratic problem. Its an american problem, and its quintessentially american. Its a problem that. Democracys the world over. Have experienced and for the most part have solved. And so there are two things that i want to highlight from the book in my talk today. The first of those is the gerrymanders origin story. And i think for those of you who may believe that you know where gerrymandering comes from, if you read the book and hopefully i explain this today as well, i think youll most likely find that you are wrong, that the origins, gerrymandering are, both older and more interesting than the legend that gets generally told in most of the history books. The second thing that i want to talk about is the continuing effects that gerrymandering has on our elections in. States like wisconsin, in states like florida and all over the nation. And the major problem with gerrymandering as see it. And i was speaking with a gentleman on this theme prior to my talk tonight. The fundament and most basic functioning of a Representative Democracy depends on at least a level of electoral responsiveness and by electoral responsiveness. What mean is that the people at the very least need to the option when they are unhappy with the things their representatives in government are doing to throw the bums and replace them with a set of representatives who presume a bully will do Something Different and the major harm of gerrymandering is that severs that link between representatives and the communities whose interests they supposed to be fulfilling in government. It undermines the basic responsiveness of the electoral system in a way that prevents voters, from Holding Politicians Accountable for the things that they do while they are in office. And you probably need me to tell you that when politics dont have to worry about when the party that holds the majority doesnt have to worry about enacting popular policies when they know that their seats are safe, when they know that their majority is safe, they dont have to keep their fingers on the pulse of public opinion. They are free to use their power and authority to pursue whatever selfinterested or partizan that they would like to do, but are often constrained from doing because those will be unpopular with the electorate. And so in addition to the history of gerrymandering, this is also a book about the present of gerrymandering and for reasons that i talk about, the book, my goal in writing this was to kind of sound the alarm bells to send out a warning to the American People that their democracy is not safe. And this is the kind of warning that a lot of are sending out right now for a variety of different reasons. But i gerrymandering at its core is much more threatening to democratic than any of the other problems that are routinely and commonly identified in our system. I want to begin with the origin story of gerrymandering. Every good villain needs an origin story and preferably that mythology should be shrouded in mystery. And when i began researching this book, i. Thought that i knew quite a bit about the history of gerrymandering, but it turned out that there was a much richer and history going back just to the founding era. And the framers, the constitution, but going back even before then to the colonial period and even further into british antiquity. And so i want to touch a little bit to begin with on that origin and where it was that gerrymandering came from. On wednesday i was participating in an event at the Sandra Day Oconnor institute for american democracy in phenix and i had the the pleasure to kind of lavish praise on the state of arizona for being among the best in the nation and for how they conduct reading acting and unfortunately as i have already hinted at, i do not have good news on that front tonight about the state of wisconsin nor the news particularly good about my home state of florida either. But part of the issue with gerrymandering is while it has always been whether in American History the politicians today have a fundamentally different set tools by which they manipulate the outcomes. Our elections tools were simply not available. Even 25, 30 years ago. And the effects of that, as ill talk about a little bit later, can be seen in the results of elections in states like wisconsin, which are fundamentally unrepresentative of way that people actually vote and that the harm of gerrymandering, in a nutshell, the most basic level of a functioning democracy as said, is a of responsiveness and gerrymandering. It has always been with us threatens to undermine that responsiveness and that accountability. T today in a way that it has never previously in u. S. History history. Most accounts of the origin of gerrymandering trace back to an individual who had a very long and impressive and storied career in american politics. Guy by the name of Elbridge Gerry and. The pronunciation of Elbridge Garys last name, of course, lends us the term gerrymandering, or, as it was pronounced around about the first 50 years that the term was in use gerrymandering. And when i was the book, i was actually able uncover the first historic reference to gerrymandering being pronounced with a soft g as gerrymander ring as opposed to the hard g and this is difficult to do because obviously when you go back that far in history we dont have recordings of people actually anything. So i set out to look for the possible historical reference to how the word was actually pronounced. And i found that in transcripts of the Constitutional Convention of, the state of indiana in the mid 19th century, and one of the delegates whose name was john pettit, which coincidentally is actually the name of one of my ancestor ers, who was a british Navy Lieutenant and privates here i think privateer is, the more politically correct way to say what he engaged in during his career and back in the 1700s. But this delegate. Pettit, made comments during a debate over a proposed clause in the state that would have the by then you equities practice of of gerrymandering and he was quoted as saying during the debates criticizing his opponents for constantly gerrymandering the state and maintaining this was the way that the word be pronounced with the soft. One of the things that i found most surprised when researching the history this topic was that not only gerrymandering, not with Elbridge Gerry, who famously was the governor of massachusetts. In 1812, he had been finally elected to that office after running five times without success and after finally being elected governor of massachusetts, he found himself frustrated by divided government in, particular the majority, his political opponents, the federalists held in the state senate at the time, gary was democratic, republican he had aligned himself with the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and then also James Madison. But during his first term in office, he found himself frustrated by divided government and he had been elected with all of these grandiose policy ideas. He was going to usher in a democratic republican agenda, a state that had previously dominated by his federalist opponents, and the myth of the origin of gerrymandering is that concocted a scheme to rig the results of 1812 massachusetts elections, and he did so by the state Senate Districts in such a way that even if federalists were to win the popular vote, the democratic republican would nevertheless capture a majority of the available seats kind of similar to happened in a number of recent elections here in wisconsin. And so gary set about drawing the districts and one district in particular, a state Senate District in essex outside of boston was particularly mish shaped and it was this kind of serpentine district which snaked its way around borders of the county packing together as many federalist voters as possible. And the idea was that if you put all of the federalists in this one district, then democratic republicans can pick up all of the other seats in the county. And that, in fact, what happened in subsequent election, more citizens in county voted for the Federalist Party than did the democratic republicans. But because of this gary mander, the republicans were nevertheless to pick up a majority of the seats, the origin of the term gary mander stemmed from an article that was in a newspaper called the boston gazette and it probably would not have taken on historical momentum that did were it not for famous cartoon that accompanied that newspaper article and youve probably seen cartoon if you google word gerrymander its much the first image thats always going to come up and think i have a version of it. We click back a second on the cover of. My boothat is the gerrymander cartoon of the state Senate District in essex county, massachusetts. But what often gets left out of this story is that not only was gerrymandering happening long before Elbridge Gary created this original gerrymander in essex county, but gary himself was even responsible for the plan that led to his ever lasting historical infamy that, led to his most Lasting Legacy being the portmanteau of gary and salamander which the district was said to resemble that, became attached to this kind of unseemly practice of manipulating districts for political gain. Gary had, if you believe his biographer, most of the contemporary Gary Historical accounts that i uncovered or suggested that gary himself was not especially keen on the plan he thought that it was overly partizan. He thought that it was untoward and nefarious. But he kind of went along it because more than that wanted to get the stuff done that he had been elected to do and. Getting that done meant controlling state legislature. So while the original gerrymander was created by the massachusetts state legislature, it was garys name that became to it. So if theres one thing that i hope this book does, its that editor, at least to some extent, vindicates the historical legacy of. Elbridge gary, who is remembered chiefly for this even though he went on to serve. As Vice President of the United States, James Madison, even he was one of the massacre sits delegates to the constitution final convention in philadelphia and was extremely influential in the creation of the bill of rights. Gary, i think would have made a great president ial candidate as well if he were a younger man and his age was pretty. The only thing that prevented him from being remembered as James Madisons successor as president , rather than for this unseemly practice, very unfortunate in italy, passed away while he was serving Vice President under madison and the rest of course, is history. And so once i realized that everything we thought we about the origins of was pretty much wrong, i tried find out what was the earliest historical example of gerrymandering occurring on. The american continent. And that took me back almost a century from 1812 massachusetts. Its to the 1730 is in the colony North Carolina and it turns out that the inventor of american gerrymandering was even an american himself like me and if youve detected the hint of an accent, i was in fact born in great britain. I emigrated to the United States to study for my ph. D. In American Government and actually this year i became, a fully naturalized u. S. Citizen. So having torts and researched american elections for almost two decades now, this will be the first time that i actually have an opportunity to vote in one last election i voted in was actually the 2016 brexit referendum and. As if youve checked in with uk politics recently, that one didnt go terribly well for us us. The individual who i make the case in the book should remembered as the creator of american gerrymandering is a British Colonial governor by the name of George Barrington or barrington to give his name the standard british pronunciation. Unfortunately, there are no known likenesses. George barrington that survives to the present day, which is why he is represented by the social media account avatar that i have on the screen here. But barrington was a truly fascinating character. He was an individual who was not born an aristocrat but always strived to run in the same social circles as the british upper class. And i think this is in some way responsible for the enormous chip that he on his shoulder throughout his political career. In the book, i go into some of the many colorful and sometimes violent stories marred the history. George barringtons political but the thing that he is actually in not remembered for is the creation of american gerrymandering and. Ironically he was responsible for doing exactly what Elbridge Gerry is accused of. And yet i have tried vain. But i think its probably too late at this point to introduce term the remainder into the american political lexicon. But im going to keep trying because this is the guy who this practice should in fact be after. So barrington was the British Colonial governor of North Carolina in the thirties, and by the time he got around to in the practice of gerrymandering, he was actually on his second stint in that particular position. There. Theres a very interesting story how he ended up losing and then regaining his job. But at the of spoiling it, it involved him threatening to murder the chief justice of the North Carolina colony and assault the attorney general with a chair. More on that story. The book. But like gary he had been by the opposition his rule that he was receiving from the legislature and the Colonial Legislature in North Carolina consisted of two houses, an opera house that was made up of appointments. The governor himself and that represented the British Crown and a lower house that elected by the colonists and represented their interests. It was that lower house that barrington found himself particularly frustrated with and in a fairly outrageous piece of parliamentary maneuvering, he forced a bill through the upper house, gerrymandering, the boundaries, the lower house to ensure that his cronies would control majority and that the colonists would no longer be able to obstruct his agenda moving. There are even examples of gerrymandering occurring after, but before the of the term in 1812, massachusetts in particular in the first few elections in the state, new york and some of early elections in south carolina. And in another famous example that i talk about in the book as well, an attempt, Patrick Henry, to prevent his arch nemesis, James Madison, from being elected to the First Congress that story ended up in the only time in us history that future president s have faced off a single seat in congress the candidates were James Madison and james monroe and spoiler alert madison up winning the election despite. Patrick henrys gerrymander and went on to introduce the of rights before the First Congress. One can only imagine how differently u. S. History might have gone had