Nick seabrook wrote this book. One person, one vote, which is a history of and im going to get this right, gerrymandering the First Time Ever said that and gotten right hard. Everybody just so you know, nicks going to teach us much more than just how to pronounce the word. He has looked into something that affects us all. And so many more ways than we ever thought possible. It is something has affected us for hundreds and hundreds of years. And i think that all of us standing are sitting in this room have felt expressly here in wisconsin over the past couple of years. These are the types events that make me just like so proud to be able to hand a microphone over to somebody. And im going to hand it over to nick seabrook. Ladies and gentlemen. Well thank you, everybody, for the warm welcome. This is actually my first time both in 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 feeling that im going to enjoy my time here. The beer and cheese comes after the speaking engagements. Its very important to get those things in the correct order. Unfortunately, however, wisconsin is also famous, 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 historical pronunciation gerrymandering in america whenever. I talk about the topic of gerrymandering. One of the most frequent questions i get asked by audience is and interviewers is which is the most gerrymandered state in america and today, for the first time i can say while 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 of florida certainly gets an honorable mention, particularly under the recent leadership of governor ron desantis. You can also point to examples 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 and important theme of the book. Is that gerrymander and the manipulation of districts for political gain is not a republic problem or a democrat problem. Its an american problem. And its a quintessentially america problem. Its a problem that democracies, the world have experienced and for the most part have solved and so there are two things that i want to highlight from the book in talk today. The first of those is gerrymanders origin story and i think for those of you who may believe that, you know, gerrymandering comes from if you read the book and hopefully i can explain this today as well, i think youll most likely find that you are wrong, that the origins of jerry mannering are both older and more interesting than the legend that gets told in. Most of the history books. The second thing that i want to talk about is the continuing that gerrymandering has on our elections in like wisconsin, in states like florida and all over the nation. And the major problem with gerrymandering, as i see it and i was speaking with a gentleman on this theme prior my talk tonight, the fundamental and most basic functioning of a Representative Democracy depends on at least a basic level of electoral responsiveness and by electoral response liveness. What i mean is that the people, at the very least need to have the option when they are unhappy with the things that their representatives government are doing to throw the bums out and replace them with a new set of represented lives who presumably will do different and the major harm of. Gerrymandering is that it severs that link between representative parts and the communities whose interests they are supposed to be fulfilling in government. And it undermines the basic responsiveness of. The electoral system in a way that prevents voters from Holding Accountable for the that they do while they are in office. And you probably dont need to tell you that when politicians dont have to worry about reelection when the party that holds the majority doesnt have to about enacting popular policies when they know that their seats are safe, when know that their majority is safe, they dont have to keep their fingers on the pulse of public opinion. They free to use their power and authority to pursue whatever selfinterest did or partizan goals that they would like to do, but are often constrained from doing because those things will be 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 in the book, my 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 people sending out right now for a variety of different reasons. But i think gerrymandering at its core is much threatening to democratic accountable bility than any of the other problems that are routinely and commonly identified in our system. I want to begin with the origin story of jeremy wandering. 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 gerrymander, but it turned out that there was a much richer and longer going back, not just to the founding and the framers of the constitution action, but going back even before to the colonial period and even further back into british antiquity. And so i want to touch a little bit to begin with on that origin story and where it was that gerrymandering came from on wednesday, i 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 arizona for being among the best in the nation for how they conduct redistrict and on unfortunately as ive already hinted at i dont have good news on that front tonight about the state of wisconsin. Nor is the news particularly good about my home state of florida either. But part of the with gerrymandering is while it has always been with us in american history, the politicians of today have fundamentally different set of by which they can the outcomes of elections tools that were simply not available. Even 2530 years ago and. The effects of that as ill talk about a little later, can be seen in the results of elections in states like wisconsin, which are fundamentally unrepresentative of the way that people actually vote and. That is the harm of gerrymandering in a nutshell, the most basic level of a functioning democracy, i said, is a modicum of responsiveness and gerrymandering. It has always been with us, threatens to undermine that responsiveness and that accountability. Today, in a way that it has never previously done in u. S. History. Most accounts of the origin of jerry mannering traced back an individual, all who had a very long and impressive and storied career in american politics. Guy by the name of gary and, the pronunciation of Elbridge Garys last name, of course, lends us term gerrymandering, or, as it was pronounced for around about the first 50 years that the term was use gerrymander. And when was researching the book, i was actually able to uncover the first historical reference to gerrymandering being pronounced with a soft g as gerrymandering as opposed to the original 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 saying anything. So i set out to look for the earliest possible historical reference to how the word was actually pronounced and i found that in the transcripts of the Constitutional Convention of the state of indiana in the mid19th century, and one of the delegates whose name john pettit, which coincidentally actually the name of one of my ancestors, was a british Navy Lieutenant and privateer, i think privateer is the more politically correct way to say what he engaged during his career and back in the 1700s. But this delegate pettit made comments during a debate over proposed clause in the state constitution that would have prohibited the by then ubiquitous practice of of gerrymandering. And he was quoted as saying during the debates, i criticizing his opponents for constantly gerrymandering, the state, and maintaining that this was the way that the word should be pronounced with the soft g. One of the things that i found most surprise thing when researching the history this topic was not only did gerrymandering not originate 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 since he found himself frustrated by divided government, in particular, the majority that his political opponents, the federalists, held in state senate at the time. Gary was a democratic republican and 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 ideas, he was going to usher in a democratic republic and agenda, in a state that had previous been dominated by his federalist opponents and the myth of the origin of gerrymandering is that gary concocted a scheme to rig the results of the 1812 massachusetts elections, and he did so by drawing the state Senate Districts such a way that even if federalists were to win popular vote, the democrat republicans would nevertheless capture a majority of the available seats kind of similar to whats happened in a number of recent elections here in wisconsin. And so gary about drawing the districts and one district in particular a state Senate District in essex county outside of boston was particularly mis shaped and it was this kind of serpentine which snaked its way around the 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 was in fact. What happened in the subsequent election, more citizens in essex county voted for the Federalist Party than. Did the democratic republicans. But because of this gerrymander, the republicans were nevertheless to pick up a majority. The seats, the origin of the term gerrymandering stems from an article was published in a newspaper called the boston gazette and it would not have taken on the historical momentum that it did were it not for the cartoon that accompanied that newspaper article and now youve probably seen that cartoon if you google the word gerrymander, its pretty much the first image thats always going to come up and. I think i have a version of it. If we click back a second on the cover of, my book that is the gerrymander cartoon, the state Senate District in essex county, massachusetts. But what often gets left out of this story is not only was happening long before, Elbridge Gary allegedly created this original gerrymander there in essex county, but gary himself was not 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, the district was said to resemble that became attached to this kind unseemly practice of manipulating districts for political gain. Gary had, if you believe his biographer and most of the contemporary historical accounts that i uncovered or suggested that gary himself was not especially keen the plan. He thought that it was overly partizan. He thought that it was untoward and nefarious, but he kind of went along with because more than that, he wanted to get the stuff done that he had been elected to do. And getting that done meant controlling the state legislature. So while the original jeremy ender was created by the massachusetts state legislature, it was garys name that became attached to it. So if theres one thing that i hope this book does, its that ed, at least to some extent vindicates the historical of Elbridge Gary, who is remembered chiefly this even though he went to serve as Vice President of, the United States under James Madison, even though he was one of the massachusetts delegates to the constitutional in philadelphia and was extremely influential in the creation of, the bill of rights. Gary, i think would made a great president ial candidate. Well, if he were a younger and his age was, pretty much the only thing that prevented him being remembered as james successor as president rather than for this unseemly practice. Gary passed away while he was serving as Vice President under madison and the rest course is history. And so once i realized that everything we thought knew about the origins of jerry was pretty much wrong, i tried to find out what was the earliest historical example of gerrymandering occurring on American Continent and that took me back almost a century. 1812 massachusetts to. The 1730s in the colony of. North carolina. And it turns out that the inventor of american was not an american himself, like me and. If youve detected the hint of an accent, i, in fact, born in great britain, i emigrated to the United States to study for my ph. D. In American Government and actually earlier this year, i became fully naturalized. Us citizen. So having written torts and researched american elections for almost two decades now, this november will be the first time that i actually have an opportunity to vote in one. The last election that i voted in was actually 2016 brexit referendum. And if youve checked in with uk politics recently, that one didnt go terribly well for us. The individual who i make the case in the book should be remembered as the creator american gerrymandering is actually a British Colonial governor by the of George Barrington or to give his name the standard british pronunciation unfortunate. In italy there are no known likeness is of George Barrington that survived to the present day which why he is represented by the anonymous social media account 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 had on his shoulders throughout his political career. In the book, go into some of the many and sometimes violent stories that marred the history of George Barringtons political career. But the thing that he actually, in fact, not remembered for is the creation of american gerrymandering. And ironically, he was responsive all for doing exactly what Elbridge Gary is accused of. And yet i have tried in vain. I think its probably too late at this point to introduce the term amanda into the american political lexicon. But im going to keep because this is the guy who this practice should fact be named after. So barrington, the British Colonial governor of, North Carolina in the 1730s. And by the time got around to engaging in the practice of gerrymandering he was actually on his second stint in that particular position. Theres a very interesting about how he ended up losing then regaining his job but at the risk of spoiling it, it involved him threatening to murder the chief justice, the North Carolina colony and, assaulting the attorney general with chair. More on that story in the book. But like gary, he been frustrated by the opposition to his rule that he was receiving from the legislature and the colonial legislature. North carolina consisted of two houses, an opera house that was made up of appointments of the governor himself. And that the British Crown and a lower house that was by the colonists and represented their interests and it was that lower house that barrington found himself particularly with. And so in a fairly outrageous piece, parliamentary maneuvering. He forced a bill through the upper house, gerrymandering, the boundaries of the lower house to ensure that his cronies would control a and that the colonists would no longer be able to obstruct his agenda moving forward. There are even examples of gerrymandering occurring after in dependance, but before the creation of the term in 1812, massachusetts in particular in the first few elections in the state of new york and some of the early elections in south carolina. And in another famous that i talk about in the book as well, an by Patrick Henry to prevent his arch nemesis, James Madison from being elected the First Congress that story ended up in the only time in u. S. History that two future president s have faced off for a single seat in congress as 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 bill rights before the First Congress. One can only imagine how differently u. S. History might have gone had patrick been successful at gerrymander, luring James Madison out of the First Congress. Though thats most of what i have to say about the history of gerrymandering, but a a large part of the book is on relating some of the most interesting stories of gerrymander writing that occurred throughout the 18, 19th and 20th centuries, and in particular highlighting how this practice has intersected with and influence some of the major events in u. S. History, including the civil