 that stands in everything from working on reform efforts across the states, working on federal reform, to litigation in a couple of states where we're doing more to research and both policy research and other companies. I'm going to give you any discussion about this program. I have the voting right between the district team program manager and the common cause. What we're going to focus on right now is mostly focused on charter reform efforts. We can watch a lot of new issues, setting up a good district commission in the state of Los Angeles, and the other one is the case that we forgot. Everybody, Dan Kukun, the director of redistricting and reputation and common cause based here in Southern California. Now, we'll find where they're at in the courts, in the ballot box, in the ownership, lobbying, all of them. At the end, if you have a question, we have no cards in the back. So please write your question on a note card in the back and then the picture on here. Please raise your hand. Is going to collect those note cards at the end and pick them out if we have time for questions. Many of us think that redistricting is a walking issue or getting on interesting. If you love so much here, some of you don't want to see here. I'm going to be here with regular people. The question is the only thing that happens every 10 years. But our district's from the local city council to congressional seats has a million very far from what we are in presentation means. And we've seen a grant of political division during angry threats. Turn them out for democracy. So. Are fully empowered. Thank you. The commission voters, not politicians. First, we'll discuss how we approach the city and community by community to enter the country. So first, let's take a step back. A little bit. Who draws the lines and redistricting now. So we're going to cost a little bit about the different hours that are used. Yes. Yeah. So just a table set. I think there's a whole number of ways to slice and dice the various different systems across the country. I'm a credit center. We have drawn more broad categories for. So. Um, the, uh, Uh, process. The third time of the district system are advisory commissions. And if you've been by three commissions, there is a commission that was that maps, but then send them to the legislature. There are variations here as well. There's some advice, for example, the legislature can only give, uh, uh, the draft mapping of. Uh, and there are states like Utah for the legislature. Or what the advisory commission does and just substitute it to older missions where citizens are free for conflicts of interest. Uh, and have full authority to adopt maps and generally represent Republicans, Democrats and. Uh, the structure and the number of commissioners on various federal states that currently there are four independent commission states that tiered California and Arizona. The pros and. Mission types. Yeah, I think there are. Uh, I think there are a few for putting these. Uh, states which you put in your traffic commission. That's a pretty solid way. Uh, we're more doing it now. So we have a different commission approach. Uh, we're going to have a deployment process before you can have a commission out there running. What role does the legislature play in our actual. Um, It's a multi defense process. We've been very liberal. Uh, they don't. Uh, you know, they don't even want that. But from the recent election initial, they're not calling it any. That's before the. The process started with commission. They want that for one way to distinguish. Uh, during the process. If you have a ban on. Um, Um, outside posts. Uh, then. Yeah. Make those calls to the people. Hey, director appointed. You're making a knot. I mean, Uh, So during the process, if you. Ensure all communication ground. I don't know. But that's really hard. And then. Uh, By the very end of when we have the, uh, you know, Actually it's an age. It's a. Uh, It's really a bad process. It's a commission, uh, commission itself. I would say. And here it is. The ability to, there's some places. Well, You can't really have to give it back. That's right. Sure. For example, the great white lives of process. Uh, Probably. And, um, The legislature really working the trash. Divide itself. I mean, I informed. There's a sole purpose of making sure. No democratic. Do you know, Uh, Oh, What, Right. Uh, I think it's. It's a really long history. Of. The degree for political gain. Um, In a modern parts of the country. California, California's very much. ridiculously. Can you give us a little bit of the history. Of how we got very California. With our independent commission. Welcome. level and also the level of the emissions? Yeah, let me start by, oh, that's nice. Hi, so I'll show you what I said before was brilliant. Let me tell you a little bit about how independent this was in California. And it really does kind of represent the kind of goals it stand for, and we have an equal number of Democrats are helping with the four-to-first panel. It really is a way to balance out the partnership. We have the four people who are not affiliated with either party. They are very strong, confident in their restriction of ensuring that they're on the side of it. Aren't allowed in the room. We don't put a locker here in the car and we select the officials, the lobbyists. There's no restriction on donors over a certain threshold. There's really robust screening process. It's almost like you've got to apply to college. There's essays, there's interviews. So just make sure that people are really committed and willing to do their work in a non-partisan and open way. You have requirements for going around the state, hearing from the public, you have no conversations about the act on and have it outside of the public meeting. So again, no spoken rooms, no calls, senior calls from legislators, like it's just not allowed. You've got a two-part selection process, sort of one that's randomized. And the initial group of disability represents diversity of state. It's up to those folks who would pick first to make sure that it does look like a state. Like the remaining commissioners really reflect the diversity of California. And I'll talk a little bit about how we kind of got to that model. I think it can be described as sort of a long, a decade-long process of realizing that politicians have no business doing anything when it comes to redistricting. I mean, you had an early reform that ended the power to statewide elected officials. It's all in the 1936 that we're giving to it. You have a free statewide elected official who are not legislators. They're going to be in power for this. That didn't work out so great. You had models in Hawaii, Pennsylvania, where I was a legislator, but they're having two parts now. At least, they were going to quit. You know, people were out of power to do business in the room to make those decisions. But at least there's going to be more under-offended transfer problems. And I think in that case, we sometimes saw, maybe sort of not so gentlemanly agreements protecting income. Then you had kind of next generation direct appointment by legislators. So it wasn't the legislators themselves, but again, sometimes that's random. People may know that they can give a rate to the saying, you know, like we, this is how they want it. You know, they should move one around the house. So again, I think we're slowly working our way toward a more independent model. And eventually we did a sort of Arizona. We had a direct appointment by legislators, but it's got to be from a screen list. You know, there was only, they've got five. It takes a look at folks. Make sure there's not countless businesses there. It takes a lot of, they don't have a lot of business doing the job. Then it has to say it's being phased. And then that eventually evolved to kind of California, Michigan, where we have a very, very limited role of legislators and a robust complex of interest in this that I described in the family out of nowhere. And now that's sort of where we landed. Legislators say, do you have a slight role where they can strike people from the list? Yeah, I think it was. Research that has some smoke out of all of the legislators. That's kind of how we got to what ends up being the most independent kind of standard models they see in California. We have two. Okay. All of the work that we did in California and to. Sorry. So we're still not. We have a question. So we'll be on the street at the end of the show. There were three bills that were before the government and the legislature. So they were focused on establishing independent redistricting permission in the state of Los Angeles, Orange County and Sacramento County. I think the big push for these came from information that we saw coming out of local redistricting processes where they weren't as independent as you thought. And so we saw political fettling. We saw, you know, people engaging in, what we determined, expertise in communication, conversations with commissioners to help draw those down as a line. So the big push, the assembly bill 1240 means it is to bring independent redistricting provisions to the larger jurisdictions here in the state of California. So for jurisdictions that have a population of over 300,000, they would be required by state law to establish independent redistricting permission. And then for school districts and for school boards who have a resident of over 500,000, they would be responsible to setting up independent permission to draw the boundaries for those school lines. We also see some of the same things that we play out in the redistricting process for the political line happening at the school board as well. I think one of the big techniques of the bills that we're seeing is that it's kind of the horrific things that we saw come out of building states in Los Angeles is really these push for some basic principles. And the basic principles kind of be on the item that Yuri touched on before, and that is including the next ban on extradition. Ensuring that the definition of community of interest is at the forefront of why the commissioners decide how they're going to draw those district lines. Thanks. We'll touch a little bit more on LA in a minute, but first I want to turn more to the national context. So Yuri, could you tell us a little bit more about what we're seeing across the country via the court cases or experiences of redistricting in other states? Yeah. I think all these things, there's a lot to say in terms of the somewhat physical state of redistricting across the country. I'm going to focus on a couple of things. One, I want to talk about the ways that the legal landscape has shifted as the U.S. Supreme Court has run for more over in partisan and really emboldened bad action by the legal interests. So over the course of the last decade, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the voting right. And the 2013 shall be coming. The older decision had invalidated and left in one of the court provisions of the People of Voting Rights Act that required certain states with a history of discrimination to submit their maps for their parents before they took effect to the U.S. Department of Justice or to your medical judge. So for the first time since 1965, many of these redistricting cycle without those clearance protections communities of color for the first time locked those protections. They also, the U.S. Supreme Court also being more difficult to bring in cases under the other part of the Voting Rights Act, which is called Section 2, which allows private parties to bring in litigation after a policy or a map has been passed. That's not only the communities of color of the larger community to participate in the process. We didn't believe that in Section 2, but that was the instance based out of Alabama and Oregon. That was a huge victory, massive success. But if I'm going to emphasize that, that just helped the steps, that helped the line. There weren't any gains made in that litigation. The other big thing that I want to highlight, that I have expressed in the court has done, and there are many others, but this is the third one that I'll touch on now, is they definitively said that federal courts cannot release parties in the area. In the 2019 case of North Carolina in Ruja, in Hong Kong, the court said that that part of the jury member is bad, but federal courts cannot have the ability to listen to the knowledge or the standard needed to be able to resolve a part of the jury member dispute. So what did that mean? What did those legal developments mean as we went into this discussion in a second? Well, if you look at what legislatures across the country did, politicians across the country did, they took those signs to mean we have free money. And that's an important thing to remember, part of what the law does, part of what these legal safeguards do, is they have to go black. Bad conduct is made in simply as people feel like that there is risk and not one of them. And so, we have seen race and law across the country. There was no attempt to comply with the Voting Rights Act in states like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, others. There were explicit attempts in places like Florida to ignore the state constitution and the protections that voters of color get from the state constitution in Florida. And the Sanctis specifically targeted a district that gave black voters an opportunity to recover from her candidate in northern Florida and said, no, dismantle that district. We took maps into the legislature. Again, before the state constitution, we applied for legal aid, but every single time the process went back to the same political mission that's submitted during Vanderbilt, over and over again. And what that means is the 2022 election was felt using backgrounds. And given the close control of the Congress is, when you look at the fact that the scripting for the maps were placed in Alabama, in Georgia, in Louisiana, we have courts that have decided these spaces when you start to add up these districts, it's a massive, massive, massive crime. And so the thing that I want to convey is that democracy space is harder to unwind hard because elections happen and we have to live for the consequences of those elections. And it's absolutely critical that we have and it may be in states in which it wouldn't necessarily produce perfect maps, but certainly when you look across the country, they aren't changing with the same sort of overt attempts to immortalize the communities and this new representation. So speaking of how we get to good maps, obviously independent commissions take the power away from the law institutions and put it in citizens' hands to draw those lines but what are independent commissions actually doing that's so different from these other models that makes a difference to communities and it could kick us off. Yeah, I mean, independent commissions place a really huge focus on putting people first, getting input from communities. There's obviously requirements and laws that create these commissions but just to make sure the ways they're picked means that they really have a good faith desire to hear from the public and learn and not to draw masters with or manage me. Talking a little bit about how I place that both kind of forward during and at the end of the process when it resolves. The California Commission had 203 mapping sort of community sessions just introducing people to the idea of where the street was, kind of a reminder. Radio advertising, billboards, bus stop ads, social media they put in as newspapers, weeklys, there's even kind of an interesting creative program to solicit community interest information from jails. People who are in the jail system and they've got 1,300 packs back from really fasting information on them. During the mapping process we had 200 fully public and live stream hearings on mapping. Tens of thousands of California's gay public comments we have hundreds of organized constituency groups that weigh in. We also have language interpretation of that community and put some people to respond to in the language that they chose. What are some outcomes? How do we actually do for communities? I'm going to talk about a few stories that are in a great report on California common cause co-authors California and it's a short thing or institute that really stands closely in the works of California's commissioners. For starters, there were no losses that we heard Yuri take off several losses per second because that's how the industry goes. There's map drawings, somebody's shoes incredibly the California does the process, nobody's shoes. There were some interesting specific stories kind of in little areas of Turtle County and San Barbara County that they should be kind of united with really very wealthy coastal communities. It didn't really make a lot of sense when they got community feedback or its process ended up in their own in their own districts. So like Latino and Asian American majority of those districts were brought directly from the input. There was a to get very granular to think about the way that California commission really listens to very granular specific community input. There was an Asian American neighborhood in San Jose, very awesome which talked about community center that they shared with their neighbors and their language classes that really that the community used in high school, that was kind of central to everybody local community. There was testimony from Latino in Kern, Davisville County in Central Valley about the need to keep to the communities out of their children and grandchildren of undocumented girls and what some of the economic inequities that those communities make and essentially keep them together and also the Latino majority district right. So just a huge difference I'm not necessarily talking about other states but Colorado also has an independent commission created. There was a big push including from Common Cross to get a majority Latino district and although we need to quite get the majority of the Latino influence district it matters it matters. So this input matters that are behind this. I just, I mean I think what Dan is laying out is critical and I just want to take a half step because what redistricting is all about and why it happens is because of the population change. Communities evolve, states evolve, demographics shift the way that people live changes over the course of time and ours is a system that is supposed to adapt with these changes by the census to track them from a population standpoint and it's actually by the redistricting cycle that exists from this standpoint at least from a numerical standpoint we need to rebalance districts from the standpoint of each one having probably the same number of people but there also needs to be that qualitative component and that's what Dan is discussing redistricting injects that qualitative component by looking to the people who are most familiar with their communities and the ways that they evolve rather than looking to elsewhere and then what is that elsewhere? Well if you look at other states mostly it's they're looking at specifically as the sophistication of data has increased so has increased the sophistication of there is a very good understanding of alternatives that sit in backgrounds and iterate over and over and over again trying to control for all the variables to produce specific political outcomes and that's the real difference is whether the process is about generating certain outcomes as the front-end poll or whether it's about capturing communities and then making sure that the way the districts work to configure to come to that end complies with various state funds that make sense from a partisan standpoint from a critical standpoint and I guess those are really the differences in point when you look reduced to a way which is so crude and even if what that breeds is grouping people together that may not share much at all and that creates the entire political process from the way campaigns are run and what candidates will do to the sort of polarization that we're seeing and while the political science is uncertain around the link between very Mandarin globalization and talk to lawmakers there's certainly acknowledgement that because the competition is exclusively at the primary level because the districts are wrong to perform consistently at the general level that that impacts the tenure of the logistical discourse in the way that business gets Thanks. Now we should go a little bit on address the elevated group which is that we are here in LA which had a huge redistricting scandal many of you may be aware of this angle already that happened this past winter when audio recordings were made of city council members or maybe racist indicative remarks but also putting attempts to potentially undercut the power of law and in response to this we've seen both legislation introduced on the state level as well as really strong local efforts of calling public lead in LA which Russia has been working on so Russia can you tell us a little bit more about where we are and how we got here so there's two actual cities that have a local couple and this is the West Hamlet and they have a couple of those issues so the local response is in both jurisdictions they're calling for independent redistricting in both jurisdictions and the goal is to put valid initiatives before the voters hopefully in November of 2024 the voters can decide to establish independent redistricting commissions in both of these jurisdictions so those commissions are currently set up right now based on some of the definitions of year-to-year officials and that have their opponents to their chosen person kind of that they're wouldn't be dealing with so we saw that explicitly on this you know we've heard from a number of states that are going to say like get your person in order what makes your person unique to this map and they need to be called back to the table and since then there is what they call the HAVTOP committee for governing the reform which is itself a committee of the city council and it's part of their community that needs to be regulated they are trying to gather input from the public from organizations like Britain Center from organizations like how do you set a vision what should that look like what should be a forefront what should we set up here in LA and in San Francisco so to answer how we would be brought here it's like you just thought and how we would implement a process and really the purpose of that endpoint was how do I preserve my seat how do I preserve how do I draw this map so that I have the chance at my name to be the representative of this seat which is to a lot of the point from a period of time is that it really undermines the electorate and their ability to choose what we are observing mostly is that the champion for independent redistricting is coming up all over so it's from a lot of grassroots organizations so grassroots efforts are really leading the way here in Los Angeles and that's kind of one of the folks who are really on the ground the other folks are good government groups like the legal voting voters common cause Vernon Center other organizations and hyper-level media really hyper-level media is really paying attention to this issue and all of that that collective, that coalition together is really pushing this through what we're seeing in terms of principles that are coming out of this some high level principles that we're hearing that folks want to see the strength band on expertise and communication what we need by expertise and communications is the commissioner being able to have a conversation outside of the public meeting with an elected official for someone else to influence their decision-making the other principle that we're really saying is putting in the forefront of the definition for the community of interest and ensuring that that community of interest is at the forefront of how maps are drawn on the future another really large principle that we're seeing is ensuring that commissioners part are independently selected so like the official hand is hiding this in my person these people that we're going to put in the seats and ensuring that the people who sit at that table are individuals just like you and I we've gone through some of the stuff that Dan has shared before but they're coming to the table with an interest and a desire to decide how we're going to draw a district path and a district line in a way that protects their life and this is what it is and that was a really interesting pleasure talking about the local path to see you are working on a local level I as a legislative director from a state-wide level you've got this interplay going on between different advocacy efforts do you work best for this big jurisdiction or you know if you're going back to your state and our agency is headed into the commission so what would you do best for you so Rasha can you talk a little bit more about how you see that interplay work out in effectiveness so I think this is going to give me one but I'm not a lawyer I'm going to say it's independence so I think that at the Rasha's level we're seeing a happy interplay of the state legislation so there's a little bill in the movie before that the legislature on behalf of the governor says it's called Senate Bill 52 that would actually require the city of L.A. to have an independent redistricting commission by chief office of basic parameters by 2030 regardless of what the city does so if the governor decides to sign it L.A. has to do it if the governor signs maybe 1248 larger jurisdictions they have to do with some basic parameters and so I think that interplay it is beneficial recently because because once we allow the local jurisdictions to really hit down on the police they can decide for themselves what other parameters do we want to see what do we want to see really fleshed out and so I don't necessarily see them as a tension I just think it has to go off on the other and that you can either have a state representative put together a piece of legislation before you're being mandated and so we're seeing it all over the state at the local level at the state level and I think they'll both bear it out and they'll come out of it thanks for that I think that's one of the difficult things about independent redistricting is the fact that the four states that currently use it all have the impact is it's a bit of an outlier it's not worth going into the nuances there but essentially it was the incredible threat of the citizen's initiative that then brought the legislature into action and this kind of I feel like what's needed for reform in redistricting because the power of redistricting is to power once you have it you can give it up it is that there needs to be uncertainty there needs to be something that creates a little bit of opportunity I think part of that came from the political will and it didn't get over the finish line of the pandemic, we failed our efforts but there was real momentum going and the reason why is because in all likelihood because there is the governor's veto on material the legislature the Democrats there was suddenly the will of Republican leaders to give up the pandemic and give it into a process because they felt like going through the legislative process having them vetoed and having the process ended up at the state supreme court was probably going to reduce something more favorable to Democrats and like that it was going to be a process with good produce and so that created a bit of an opportunity so that's with good produce and so that created a bit of an opportunity so that's going to be to be steering the court making sure that there is steering the court making sure that there is a normal legislative process and the other thing that I'll say and the other thing that I'll highlight is don't turn your notes up better is better and even in a state like New Mexico where a fairly sweet advisory model was adopted on a structural standpoint it's still changed the game in terms of the public's engagement in redistricting and the public's understanding of redistricting and overall transparency in the process and that shouldn't be in my opinion because we should all be thinking about this in the long term and that first step helps a lot of additional performance possibilities that will take about all of the state of industry in Virginia I need to use sports allergies but I'll meet on football for this one sometimes you've got to get off your football and that means you're not level you've got to ask games you might be running the football to give yourself a little bit of freedom and so that's the other thing to cover this as a multi-step process and think about what part some of the new goals that are in this role even if there are days where you don't want to play football I really hope that takeaway don't be scripted so with that we do the college area and this idea of how it's not your business and I think a lot of people want to have parties well I think it works so parties have really robust databases that collect data from every single election they track every single voter that casts the ballot and they actually ascribe the likelihood that someone will vote has voted and what that person's like is they do that household by household by household and given that in data that's available and given the sophistication of data analytics it is really not that hard to actually get a pretty accurate picture of how different individuals will be able to and so then what people during the interview may be on a district map and then they run different elections, scenarios, group what happens if this is for the map in a very important year what happens if this is for the map in a democratic year what happens if the turn out is low what happens if the turn out is not how does this map perform in a presidential year in an interim year so on and so forth and the goal is to iterate into figure out what map will most consistently produce the same result that in French is one set of political interests to be a solution of others and walk in the majority of the sensitive to private orders Yeah, I'll just just add that the way that's done on a community level is to either pack or crack orders to put as many as one type of order and just do this as possible pack them so that maybe they can win over one majority maybe two districts or the crack a bunch of districts so they can't really win and what we heard on the L.A. takes, we listened really closely we actually hear one of the companies that says go back and record data do you have time to call your staff and I think that you were just talking about do you have to hand staff for these two staffers to go back to each other and I want to re-run these maps because they actually did really good for us the council members they wanted to make sure that this plan was actually losing which is great but that's what they were doing and they were re-running that box they re-run the data call your staff to go back so that you can see what that data looks like so we can produce the map that is bigger I think it would be great and in the end if you criticize what she's looked like how do you maybe get back and incorporate what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the what are the a lot of the report about the Health and Health Commission, about how to take in, if that's going to take in, do you think there's a difference? And really, it sometimes, I think, could feel like a fire hose, and it had a distribution between every particular opposing and new point that the commissioners do the best they can against the fake actors. I think they come out with pretty decent results, but I think that the challenge of mutual commission is really working out a process that, in an effective way, that's not the solution. Yeah, I think we're figuring out whether that could play a role in the issue of work. That's what I'm trying to figure out. I'll say, the thing about polarization has to be high, and so it's not that the sort of geographic distribution and the tendency of Democratic voters to live in cities and suburbs makes, builds it in an excuse to district maps. It's more that that reality has made it much, much easier to draw a very reliable guarantee. We should probably talk about what that number is. One side, we'll quickly respond and I'll test my colleagues with the effort. I think very long, which is free, for these alternate programs to set up in this category. Studying them here in Los Angeles, there was actually a little bit of a task. Multiple parties here, lots to be learned from that time. And in this long day, you have to think about information and the location of voters having many more assistance. So, whether that be, you know, right now, you know, most common elections in the local office in California, for no reason, it's a little different. And how can we extract voters? How do we form voters? And those are the unique priorities of the public conference, and like, how do we implement them, what form, the age? I think that there's still an opportunity to have a concept on these different political reforms in the MMI. But personally, I'll take on my kind of concept. I work on how to, you know, like, California, California is our city to have a support for our reputation. Very, very good. I think, I think it just, there needs to be more of a concept. You want to see that, I think it will be helpful. Oh. What do you all think, actually? I think this is more of a great question. What are your districts? What are your districts? Yeah, it's a very good question, and it's a difficult question to answer, because there are those brilliant details about why it comes to the multi-member districts right before it's going. So, first, multi-member districts first across the coast, which is, you know, better take off, does not work. That's a whole tool, I've got to say. So, that is kind of the worst of all. Now, multi-member proportional systems are very intriguing, and I think they're particularly intriguing. But the thing that I would say that they might, and none of you are saying, enforcing and whatnot, I think one, for instance, in our annotations, I'm looking kind of at our presentation. So, these are things that we are researching, we are thinking about when we do take the decision on these sorts of things. And anyway, they said why is because certain communities face all sorts of barriers in cultural representation. Certain communities are registered at different rates. Certain communities are now at different rates, and there are structural reasons for why that is based, and all of those sorts of factors need to be considered. You can't invent a number of proportional multi-member districts in the kind of a hypothetical scientific experiment to get what you have. Now, these, what I would say one of the things that I have been working on are state voting rights. And it's recently been trended with state voting rights acts, and California was the first Washington voting state was the second. Now, there is one in New York, where in New York, there's one in Pennsylvania, there's one in Oregon, and there are those, and mainly in Michigan and New Jersey and Maryland. It's an idea that's getting impacted on the features of state voting rights acts, is there is flexibility when it comes to how to vote rights. I would say in the group next, which includes things like the range of race voting, like individual voting, and so there is a certain awareness that we have to invent or expand simply, but I think there's also awareness that the specific facts and the circumstances matter. Will it work in one place, or does it certainly work in one place? Yeah, Congress was in the same place. I think we take the lead from local state voting to some kind of play out in that context. Now I've been involved in alternative voting, by itself, right? So it's probably going to be going to see if they can buy you. Most members of the system just haven't looked for questions. I was wondering, in absolutely no way, the California Congress supported a post-legislation that would reveal that before the California had its use. I think they're out of time. All right. I'm out of time, but thank you so much for those audience questions, and a huge thank you to our panelists.