 Good evening and welcome to Policy Talks at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I'm Matt Grossman, Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. Yes, they let a Spartan moderate tonight, but my Institute, Ipser, has been working closely with the Ford Schools Center for Local, State and Urban Policy to help Michigan's independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. We're all in this together. The redistricting commission is about to start holding 16 public hearings around the state. And tonight, we'll hear from three commissioners and four expert panelists with experience in other states to help make those hearings fair and effective. You'll see the hearing dates now and at closeup.umich.edu, where you'll also find links to many additional resources. Special thanks to Connie Cook and Charlie Beal from Voters Not Politicians for coordinating this great group of presenters. We'll begin with three of Michigan's commissioners, then we'll have them depart to comply with Michigan laws and we'll have a Q&A with our expert panelists. The questions come from audience members submitted beforehand and tonight. There's still an opportunity to submit questions on YouTube or social media and Voters Not Politicians will help answer some of the questions directly in the live chat. Although originally scheduled to end at eight, we'll be staying on until 8.15 to get through as many questions as we can. Let me thank the organizers and co-sponsors, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Voters Not Politicians, the Center for Local, State and Urban Policy, the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, the University of Michigan program in practical policy engagement, the League of Women Voters of Michigan and Detroit Public Television. Now please welcome three Michigan commissioners to tell us what they're doing and what they hope to learn from the hearings. Our first presenter will be Douglas Clark from Rochester Hills, followed by Rebecca Zatella from Wayne County and Dustin Witches from Ypsilanti. Bios for the presenters are available at closeup.umich.edu and in the live chat. And now commissioner Douglas Clark. Thank you, Matt. Good evening, everyone. It's an honor to be here this evening. I'm Douglas Clark, a resident of Rochester Hills, Michigan and a commissioner on the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. As you're aware, the commission consists of four individuals that are affiliated with the Republican Party or that are affiliated with the Democratic Party and five nonpartisan commissioners. I am affiliated with the Republican Party. However, I'm not active in the Republican Party. I've lived in Michigan since 1977. My education includes a bachelor's and a master's degree. My professional career was as an operations and software development manager for large multinational corporations. Additionally, I've spent four years in the military as a captain in the United States Army. I applied for the commission because it was important for me to ensure a fair and impartial redistricting process within Michigan. Strong personal characteristics that I can bring to the commission are objectivity and ability to work constructively with others and an honest and sincere approach to addressing the issues of the commission. I have some thoughts on public hearings that I would like to share with you this evening. Public hearings are a very important and significant part of our redistricting process. Let me focus on one aspect of public hearings that is significant. That would be the personal interest of the diverse communities throughout the state. The hearings allow us to listen and understand what each of these communities identify as the important aspects of redistricting in their individual areas. For example, I met with one of the public meetings in the state and of interest and importance to the city officials in that area was that their town was entirely in the same district rather than the two districts they are currently in. It saves them manpower, money, and they only have to have one set of ballots rather than multiple ballots for the community. Even though this is a simplistic example, it's very important that these types of issues are understood by the commission through the public hearings. Now I'd like to introduce one of our other commissioners, Rebecca Zatella. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for having me here tonight. My name is Rebecca Zatella. I am another member of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. I am an attorney. I've been practicing law for over 20 years and my primary area of focus is technology licensing contracting. I applied for the commission because I strongly believe that a citizen led process is more likely to result in maps that are focused on enabling fair representation and ensuring that everybody's voice is heard. I think one of the concerns with having political parties draw maps is that there tends to be a focus on maintaining power rather than focusing on ensuring fair representation for the citizens. In terms of the public hearings, I'm most excited to hear local insights into where people think lines should be drawn. There's lots of different factors that are gonna come into play for us and unfortunately we are just 13 people and we do not have the deep knowledge and familiarity of individuals who live in particular areas with respect to what makes sense in terms of where to draw lines. Maybe those lines are geographic boundaries, maybe they're freeways, man-made boundaries, but whatever those lines might be, the people who live there are the ones that are gonna be able to guide us and give us the best guidance as to where a logical district line should be drawn. In terms of what I think we need to ensure fair and effective hearings, first of all, I am incredibly excited that citizens are actually having a say. As we all know, in the past redistricting was done in back rooms by political parties where citizens had little to no impact or transparency into the process of how those lines are being drawn and how those maps were created. And so just the mere fact that the citizens have the ability to comment, I think is incredibly exciting and I hope that the citizens are excited and they come to our public hearings and they give us the feedback that they haven't been able to give in the past so that we are then informed when it comes to drawing these maps and able and empowered to create fair and effective maps. I'm gonna pass off to my fellow commissioner, Dustin Wiches, Dustin. Dustin, you're muted. Whoops, I guess I'll start over. I just wanted to thank everybody for allowing me to be here this evening and I just wanted to thank everybody. So like they said, my name is Dustin Wiches. I am in Ypsilanti. I have been here for two years but I went to Eastern Michigan University after I graduated high school. I received a bachelor's degree with a concentration in aviation and chemistry. I know it's kind of odd but I was able to somehow get those two to work for a degree and I'm currently pursuing a master's degree in mathematics from Eastern Michigan University as well. So as far as why I wanted to join the commission is I'm thinking besides drawing fair maps which is of most importance and making sure that everyone does indeed have their voices heard correctly and fairly. I'm also thinking about the young people here that are gonna be becoming of voting age within the next 10 years and making sure that they also have a fair chance to be heard in our voting process in the state of Michigan. In regards to what I'm looking to gain from the public comments, I'm solely, well, I'm not solely focused but I'm focused on communities of interest. I wanna, what I wanna gain and understand is where communities that have similar values, how they want to be heard in state legislature and those of Congress which would make sure that they're heard as well. One thing that stands out to me in regards to drawing districts is something in, I believe Arizona when they had a map that was drawn and one area way out into desert was drawn into, I believe the city and going down a river because they connected more with those particular individuals and then they didn't wanna be in the district of the individuals that were right next to them. So for example, if a community decides to say we want to ensure that our town is in this particular district or we wanna ensure that the town, for example, splits. Let's say there's a river running through it, for example. And they have two very different belief systems when it comes to politics. It makes no sense to potentially put them all in one district in my opinion. We wanna make sure that both of those particular areas have the representation that they are looking for. And with that, I am going to turn it back to Dr. Matt Grossman. And I thank you again for being here. Thanks so much to the commissioners. They'll now exit now to join us on YouTube. Our reminder that you'll be able to join them at the public hearings with a schedule in the chat or at closeup.umich.edu. We're even ahead of schedule and we're ready for our expert panel with Q&A. So I'd now like to introduce the panel. We have Kathy Fung from the National Redistricting Director for Common Cause. Colleen Mathis, former chair of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. Andre Parvenu, a former state commissioner on California's State Redistricting Commission. And Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians. Now Nancy, I'd like you to start us off. We have these public hearings coming up. What should we expect to see? Well, what are these communities of interest that some people will be submitting and what else should we see? Great, well, thanks everyone. I'm Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians. We're the grassroots group that helped to put the issue on the ballot to end gerrymandering here in Michigan. And we are thrilled to be supporting the implementation right now of the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission and the community mapping process. And I think everyone has heard now from some of our state commissioners, which is fantastic. I think what we're gonna see when you tune into these public hearings and I hope all of you will is that we get to talk with our commissioners whose job it is and who I think really are driven and committed to drawing fair maps that with input by the people that reflect the needs of our communities. What we're gonna see is people really giving information that they know, local information about where their communities are, the geographies, where the lines should be drawn or not drawn, what their interests are in their communities. And of course, the testimony of different groups, yours versus your neighbors, they might differ than they will. And I think that's gonna be a big part of what makes this process so exciting is that the testimony that some groups will be giving might differ totally from other groups. And it's all just, it's gonna be in a mix of information that's gonna be available now to the commission. And it's gonna be a public dialogue. It's gonna be, I hope, a really active conversation where the first part is the commission is inviting us now to give input. We can submit maps through a public portal that they'll be announcing soon, but we can also, we can sign up to speak at one of these public hearings. You'll be given a few minutes. You can identify yourself, what makes your community unique, why you're there and why this process is important to you, where you live and where exactly you want your community to be recognized. And then others across the state will be giving the same opportunity. So I think it'll be lively. I think it'll be a process that kind of rolls out and we'll kind of see how it develops. One of the things that we are marveling at is that this is the first time this has ever happened in our state. And so it really will be, it's whatever we're all gonna make it to be, which is really exciting. Thank you. Andre, you've been through this before. How did you prepare for the public hearings as a commissioner? And how would you advise the commission to make the best use of your time in these hearings? First of all, I wanna thank you and thank everyone for inviting me here. And I wanna say proudly that I'm a former resident of Michigan, having attended Michigan State University. However, I wanna answer that question by saying, the first thing I wanted to make sure that I did carefully and extensively was read the propositions. Proposition 11 in our case and proposition 20 as you would with proposal two. And it was important for me to become very familiar with the state itself. And it's various demographies and geographies and so on. And nothing was more useful for me than just using a basic map, an old fashioned map, like the AAA maps that we get. And another ancient valid that I use was an Atlas, to just become familiar with the state, to know where major landmarks were and major activities and just generally just to be comfortable with the state that I was charged to be very familiar with, of course, through the process. It was important also to know a little bit about Robert's rules of order. We had a parliamentarian who basically worked with our staff, was a staff person. And we also had our attorney presently for extensive discussions that we had, but knowing the Robert's of order was a very important part of what we were doing. And I had to familiarize my faculty keen act, which is a set of guidelines that sort of govern how open meetings are held. So those are some of the basic preparations that I took prior to this commission. But we're all basically none of us were experts in the beginning, we were just basic citizens. It's in our name, citizens with disability commission. So we basically were thrown together, the 14 of us and we had to learn how to work together and make this happen in a very short window of time. I hope that answers your question. It does, you're breaking up audio wise a little bit. So if that happens again, you might wanna just stop cam and that'll help you. I saw hear you, but we got the full answer. So thank you. Colleen, what should the commissioners be looking for in these presentations, either the public comments or when people mentioned this term of a community adventurist or they present one that they have, how did you look at those maps and comments in your process? Thanks, Matt. And thanks everyone for including me tonight. It's an honor to be here and get to address this group and hear from the other commissioners as well. Gosh, communities of interest can be defined in a zillion different ways. I think we all know that and it's kind of in the eye of the beholder. So what has been mentioned already that you have to go out and really sit in these communities and listen to what people are telling you they're gonna be the experts on what their community of interest is. I do think though that these criteria can be abused, frankly. There's a number of redistricting criteria that you have to consider. And in Arizona, all of ours are considered equally. They have to be weighed equally. You come to find out once you start to do the mapping they can't all be executed equally, unfortunately. You've got it, there are trade-offs. So I think it's important to have a level of discernment so to speak when you're listening when the commissioners go out on these public hearings they should have an open mind and listen to what people are telling them are their communities of interest. But also not to doubt them but to maybe probe a little deeper and find out if they've made the case for what a community of interest is. Maybe then to go take that next step and say does it really benefit from having that community of interest kept whole in one district, for instance because I guess can there be times where actually more representation could be better maybe given on because of a certain characteristic of that community of interest that it's so large that it would actually benefit from more than one representative. So I think it's important to have them A, make the case for what their community of interest is and to the extent they can give you specific boundaries boy, all the better, take them. And then do that additional level of inquiry to just find out do they really all have to be kept in the same district? I think that would be a really beneficial thing to find out and see how folks respond to that. Does that answer your question, Matt? It does. So thanks to remind everybody we just heard from Colleen Mathis who was from the Arizona Redistricting Commission the former chair and Andre Parvenu who was from a former member of the California State Commission. And we're now gonna hear from Kathy Fung who is the National Redistricting Director of Common Cause. So Kathy, we just heard a reference there to sort of not necessarily always knowing who's speaking. So how should the commissioners distinguish the testimonies that were heartfelt from individuals and those that were mobilized from groups and does that distinction matter? Well, let me just say that thank you again to Michigan and Michiganders for passing this major reform. I think what's tremendous is that for the first time as one of the commissioners noted, right? You're gonna go from backroom deals to something where it's highly participatory. In California, one of the first major commission hearings that we had after the draft maps came out, I showed up two hours beforehand and there was already a line out the door snaking around the building from people who are excited to be able to comment on the draft maps and say sort of what the commission had done right and what the commission needed to change. And that level of excitement came from the fact that people not only had something to say but believed that they would be heard. And so what I would say is in order to understand how to tell the story of your communities, I would say think about three things. So the definition of a community of interest is one where there is a neighborhood or a place of people who share common culture, concerns or counts and telling that story of what culture you share, what concerns you share and the counts meaning data can be really helpful to convincing the commission that your community is one that when you say that you'd like your community to be drawn this way for them to respect that. The critical thing that I think folks at the community level have the ability to do that's so different from how we did it before, right? That back room situation where there was a single individual drawing the lines and just looking at essentially flat data is you bring stories, you bring impact, you bring depth to being able to talk about your community in a way that if you're not from that place, you can't tell. And that's probably the biggest distinction for commissioners as well, right? Let me tell you a little bit about the story of Long Beach in Los Angeles area. Long Beach before our new commission had been formed was split into three different districts. And part of that was because there was somebody who was thinking about running for one of those districts and in order to accommodate that interest, they drew a line to kind of scoop up that incumbents house. In doing so, they split up not only the city of Long Beach into three pieces, but also an African-American and Latinx community into three pieces. Now that's just culture. Sort of you can sort of say, demographically, what's it look like? City, it has a certain shared instead of interest. But one of your commissioners said, well, what if they want to be split? So that's a good question. In this case, because Long Beach has a port and it's a major port from which a freeway comes up and it essentially distributes all of the things that come from around the globe through this shipping port. And then the freeway takes 18 wheelers to all parts of the country to deliver goods that are coming off of those ships. One of the questions was, well, what about the impact of the freeway that goes through all of these communities? And in fact, actually, as the community started to look more and more at things like what their health situation was, what the environmental situation was, they realized that they had one of the highest incidents of cancer and asthma. And so when they started to articulate the concerns that here's a community where it's split into three different pieces, there's a direct health impact. And because they can't go to their legislators to say, hey, could we have something that mitigates all of the traffic that comes through our community? Because they had to essentially talk to three different legislators. That community asked to be put always in one district. Now, not every community or city will ask for that, but that's the kind of three-dimensional testimony that folks who are thinking about talking to the commission should think about, right? What are the, how do we describe our community to people who are not from this place and really give depth to the culture, the concerns and the counts? And I think that the commissioners will be able to hear the difference, right? When you're from that place, you're gonna have personal stories, you're gonna have issues that you care about and you're gonna have depth of data that somebody who's not from that area or who might've just been organized by an incumbent might say something, but it's not gonna feel like it's got that texture to it. Thank you. And as a reminder, the audience can still submit questions in the live chat or in Facebook or Twitter. And the questions that I'm asking have already been called from those that were submitted in advance. So Nancy Wang from Voters Not Politicians, one of those was about how individuals and groups should prepare to present their communities of interest at these hearings. What would your advice be? And someone asked, should they say which communities they wanna be with and which ones they don't wanna be associated with in their presentations? Well, I mean, I think communities can participate. The great thing about this is that it's really an open public process. So as a community or as an individual, you can participate in any way that you want. It really is our process now. And I would strongly encourage everyone to just participate and not feel like you need to do certain things or have a group of a certain size in order to speak up. I think the quantity of information that this commission really needs to draw fair maps in our state. Again, because this is the first process of its kind anytime in the history of our state, is really, it's a lot. We need to hear from as many Michealanders to make the process fair and impartial and data-driven as possible. That being said, so organizations, if you're interested, there's a lot of resources available to you to help you kind of have a conversation, a facilitated conversation with community members, groups like voters, not politicians. We have a community of interest partnership program where you can sign up and we can help, just kind of go through a list of questions and have a discussion with your members about what does define your community for you? What kinds of interests are you seeking to preserve? What's been your history with gerrymandering and what kinds of things do you want to present to this commission to make sure that the future lines don't have the same negative impacts that perhaps your current district lines do. Legal Women Voters is another group that's really helping community organizations with these kinds of discussions and preparation as is the Michigan Nonprofit Association. And as to what else you can do to prepare besides having conversations, you can sit down with your community members. Or again, if you're an individual, you yourself, you don't need to be affiliated with any sort of group to make your views known to the commission. You can take a map and you can draw the boundaries around your community or you can think about them and think about landmarks that you want the commission to make sure to either include or exclude within certain boundaries. And I think as a commissioner, former commissioner of math has pointed out, the more specifics you can provide, the better. Because what the commission is really trying to do is its job is to draw large districts, districts that where we're gonna vote for our state senators and state House members as well as US congressional representatives. And so it's likely that each district that it needs to draw is going to be filled with many communities. So it needs to know your piece of the pie of that puzzle to see, okay, where are your boundaries to make sure that when we're drawing the district lines, we're not splitting up your community. Unless of course, like the examples that were given, there's some reason to do so. But so it needs to know, but in general, the kinds of shapes that you want to be kept intact and not split. And then of course, if you have the information, if you've been able to kind of, talk with your neighboring groups to say, hey, we really do share a lot of the same interests in terms of like environmental or economic interests, perhaps we all really rely on clean water in order to survive economically than by all means. It's that much more powerful, I think, if you have an understanding of the different neighborhood communities that you would like to be kept together with in a representative district. So but really it is flexible and it's just, it's gonna be dependent on, I think, a case-by-case basis, what kind of information you bring to the commission in order to make sure that redistricting works for you. Thanks. Andre, the California Commission had a long list of criteria and Michigan has a long list, some overlap, but not completely. How did you evaluate the communities of interest within your criteria? And did you have to think about the relationships at all? Is there a community that isn't as contiguous, that might have been multiple parts of the state? Is there one that overlaps local government boundaries? Should people presenting to the commission be worried about where they fit into the criteria list? Or did you sort of hear all clumbers and figure it out later? Well, yeah, our driving, our criteria began, of course, with the equal population. And we began in California with our four VRA counties with section five on Kings, Monterey, Merced, and Yolo. That was followed by, it was followed by, our strategy to have the smallest deviation part possible, 0.01% deviation. For example, in a congressional district of 710,000, we only had a margin of maybe 7,100 to work with, to maintain that deviation. But to answer your question, yeah, we are a major factor in addition to equal population and of course, looking at districts to maintain compactness and to make sure they're contiguous was Community of Interest Testimony. And that was one of the main drivers. So there was a lot of chance to actually go back to the prior question. We took Community of Interest Testimony very seriously. And basically, the overwhelming, when there was a conflict, for example, in our public hearings with some of the testimony we received, we looked at overall majority of the testimony. And there were times where we were restricted by surrounding districts as to how decisions made. We, in California, when a particular community was split in one area, for example, on our assembly district level, we would make modifications with the senatorial districts. We would call it the house in the state senate district. So breaking up and putting together, cracking and packing was a consideration that we wanted to be very much aware of. And when there were competing claims based on communities of interest, we would simply have a vote. And the 14 of us would vote and express our opinion about what we heard in public testimony and just basically draw our conclusions and go through a definite set of deliberations about what that meant before we came to a conclusion about any of these sort of undefined areas or these areas that were in contention in terms of where the line should actually be drawn. So that's basically what I'm saying here is that looking at communities of interest, testimony was primary in our decision-making process. There was a little part of that question too, if you could repeat that again, Matt. I think you got to everything. So I appreciate it. Okay, thank you. Bye. Colleen, tell us a little bit about the Arizona process for listening to communities of interest. There's sort of an assumption, I think, that our communities of interest, if they are just presented, want to be kept together and might want to be kept together in state, house and senate districts and congressional districts, but you had talked about some potential trade-offs with either being all kept together and all those districts are not. So how did you think about that? Yeah, thanks, Matt. So in Arizona, we also have constitutional criteria outlined for us that we pay attention to and follow throughout the entire redistricting process. And as I mentioned earlier, the criteria after the two federally mandated criteria are satisfied. That's complying with the US Constitution and the Federal Voting Rights Act. And equal population. The rest of the criteria are kind of standard redistricting criteria that I know Michigan is following in other states, California and others have followed too. The situation with ours though is they're not to be taken in the priority they're laid out in the Constitution. Our Arizona Supreme Court actually ruled on that during Arizona's first commission, which was from 2000 to 2010 because people had argued that, maybe those are outlined specifically to follow in a certain order. And it turns out they're not. There is no hierarchy there to be weighed equally. And communities of interest is one of those. So gosh, and listening to all of this commentary so far, it brings up the notion of, these communities of interest may not have neat and clean boundaries. There could be jagged edges and someone may assume, gosh, well, this must be no good. This has been gerrymandered in some way. There's something crazy happening in this border that we should be suspicious of. But bad shapes do not mean bad intent. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as Michigan goes through this whole process. And good shapes, conversely, good shapes don't mean good intent just because everything's a nice rectangle doesn't mean there's some underlying outcome that someone's trying to achieve. So you really need to treat it, as Nancy said, on a case by case basis. So important to listen to what people are telling you but then also kind of probe deeper, find out more about why it is that community of interests would value from being in one district, being kept whole. Because again, there may be times where it makes sense to divide on our current congressional district map, for example, I live in Tucson and three congressional districts actually come to a point in part of Tucson. So we technically have three representatives that have a stake, so to speak. They should at least be listening to the constituents of Tucson as they make their decisions in representing us. So these districts can be very large and it's impossible to necessarily put, for instance, all of Phoenix in one district that wouldn't happen, it's an enormous city. So there are gonna be decisions and trade-offs that need to be made and those trade-offs, you don't wanna weaken a community of interests, especially if they've made a really compelling case why they should be kept whole, for instance, Native American reservations, which I know you have in Michigan and we certainly do in Arizona. An interesting point that Commissioner Wiches mentioned earlier is that congressional district map that was drawn, and I encourage anybody to go look this up to see a good visual of it, the congressional district map that was drawn by the First Commission from 2000 to 2010 actually has a Native American reservation that's completely landlocked and surrounded by another Native American reservation. And that seems like, hey, great, we can put two communities of interest, two Native American reservations in the same district and that would solve everyone's problems, but it turns out actually that that reservation, it's the Hopi reservation that's surrounded by the Navajo reservation, did not wanna be in the same district at that time with the Navajo. And so what Commissioner Wiches was referring to is to the commission's credit, I believe, they found a way to honor this and respect this community of interest, the Hopi, and connect them through a dry wash because there's the contiguousness requirement. You can't just have islands throughout the state, you at least have to connect it. And they figured out a way to connect it over to a different part of the state so that they could be out from, away from in a separate district from the Navajo. So it's a fascinating visualization. It looks completely gerrymandered, which it is, it was gerrymandered for a specific reason to accommodate a community of interest wishes. So it also really to the detriment of compactness, you're kind of trading off compactness for community of interest. So the commission, the Michigan commission's gonna have to make these decisions too and listen to what people are telling them and then try to accommodate those needs to the extent practicable while they're following the constitutional guidelines. So it's really a fascinating case study, if you will, if anyone wants to look at that map and see what was done. And that was the map that was enforced from 2004 to 2010. Thanks so much. And you can see that the commissioners are able to learn from each other. The Michigan commission heard from both Colleen and Andre earlier, but we do have some different criteria. For example, Michigan's are in order and include some that weren't in the others. So I don't want anybody to be fully confused. But I did want to pass on an audience question to Kathy about how the commission should deal with all of this different information that they are going to be seeing. Should they be putting communities of interest in any kind of prioritization? Should they be organizing them categorically? How should they deal with the flood of information? And you're muted. I wanna take a minute to just say that the time that each state has sort of implemented the redistricting commission, each time folks who are on the ground really spent time to study other commissions that have been created and took advice from them. So when California was creating our commission in the 2007-08 period, we actually talked extensively to the Arizona commissioners as well as their staff. And one of the things that they told us was you could make life a whole lot easier if you would just put a priority on which criteria go first and which goes second so that we're not arguing and litigating for the next eight years. And so we took that advice and we actually put it in. And then when Michigan went in 2018, we spent a lot of time sort of looking at what California had done and what Arizona had done and said, what are the best lessons learned? So I like to think of Michigan's new redistricting laws as really reflecting kind of the best understanding of what would make for a fully inclusive and participatory process and give a lot of acknowledgement to the way the changes that Michigan has implemented in their redistricting law as real innovations. What I would say about how you get commissioners to reach consensus is on the one side, it's a, on the one side, it is about sort of how the criteria have been drafted, helps that the criteria are very clear and that they're prioritized. So that to some extent the distinctions are gonna be about small geographies and sort of whether or not it makes sense when you're trying to get to that equal population to bring in this community versus that community, but not whether compactness should in fact trump another criteria like contiguity or communities of interest. Because Michigan's criteria are clearly prioritized, it takes that any kind of argument around that out of the realm of debate. On the other side, the side of sort of what can the commission do to start to lay the groundwork to building some rapport between each other? Just like Andre said, when he was first chosen for the California commission, the 14 commissioners didn't know each other, right? They might have watched each other's interviews during the selection process, but that was their first time getting to know each other. And it was really over the course of the next few months, planning, going to meetings together, but also planning outreach, planning to go to all parts of the state, getting into a carpool to drive to each one of the hearings, sometimes being in hotels or new places and experiencing kind of the food or the stores of that place and sort of meeting neighbors and then talking with them. That became, I think, a slow bonding process between all of the commissioners where they're not only kind of seeing each other as human beings, but also learning about them in a way that is far deeper than just the DRI behind their name or what they'd have done in their professional lives, right? And in that development of a rapport, right? Finding times to have dinner with each other, to talk about each other's families, to hear each other, right? They were practicing what they would eventually have to do as commissioners, which was listening to each other, having respectful debates, finding times when maybe your mind might be changed because someone opened your eyes to thinking about something differently, right? And ultimately having enough respect for the process, which I definitely heard from the three commissioners who spoke to us today from Michigan, a real respect for the process, to say, you know what? What matters above all is that we have this open, transparent and inclusive process and I really wanna hear from people. That's exciting, right? Because it's setting a model for the rest of the country that you can have a deliberative process and inclusive process that maybe, you know, we don't always see in other parts of government and that regular folks can come together and figure out how to have that conversation even when there might be some disagreement. Now, there's oftentimes this question about, well, what if testimony comes to us from one set of community leaders who say we wanna be drawn this way and another set who say we wanna be drawn that way? And I will say, I witnessed the California Redistricting Commission having hard conversations, sometimes to the point of tears, right? Thinking hard about like what do we do? What is the right thing, right? And sometimes going back to the community folks and saying, hey, we're gonna keep deliberating about this but you all should also talk with each other, right? Because democracy is messy. It's hard sometimes. But rather than sort of taking up pitchforks and saying, you know, I don't agree with you and, you know, let's not have a conversation. What the commission process ultimately is, how about if we try something where we deliberate together and we try to hear each other out? That's really what this is all about that we can show that, you know, our little D democracy can work when we all come together. Will there always be absolute consensus? In California with our distribution of five Democrats, five Republicans and four independents, all of our maps ended up getting approved by at least 13 out of 14 people. So it's pretty close. You know, it's not 100% agreement. That's hard to expect, right? But there were enough people who listened, made adjustments, tried to be respectful of each other that we came out with maps that reached pretty close to unanimous consensus and a lot of respect for each other afterwards. I was just really inspired when I saw 14 people and what they could inspire us to all do throughout the country. And I think Michigan's commission is gonna show us just as much and the community participation is gonna show us just as much how we can reframe what's possible in our democracy. Andrew, we had a related question about how the commission came together, how it built camaraderie, how it didn't end up on all party line votes. Can you give us some of the backstory there? And maybe some advice to Michigan, the Michigan commissioners have been all online with the rest of us for the year. So they might just be getting a chance to see each other in person. How should they take advantage of that? Sure. Well, first of all, Kathy explained the process extremely well. Thank you, Kathy. You summarize pretty much the kind of camaraderie we sought to maintain. We also had a great deal of confidence coming into the process, knowing that the applicant review board that selected us did a good job selecting us. So we knew that we had very stressed. We just had to figure out what they were. So the camaraderie that we developed by having lunch and traveling together and many of the things that Kathy said was essential, especially doing the most grueling parts of our decision-making process as we were discussing various aspects about the commission that we would deliberate, for example, for hours on one subject. And but we knew that after the deliberation, even though we had disagreements, that we would still end up at the end of the day being comrades in this cause, more or less, because we knew that we had much more in common that united us than what we had to divide us. So that was a driving principle. We never really left mad at one another. We had disagreements, it's very strong disagreements, but the next day was a brand new day and we came ready, rolling up us, please, ready to work. We didn't harbor any disagreements for a very long time. There was none of these little sidebars, for example. There may have been, you know, it's just human nature to like or communicate with certain people more so than others. You just have more in common with them, but we wanted to make sure that we didn't have too many subtle subdivisions among us. You know, the little bathroom breaks discussing that you believe, again, you believe what that person said or that person, any of that kind of back, you know, behind the back kind of discussion, none of that really occurred. I mean, not that I'm aware of at least, at least myself, but basically we had a lot of respect for each other's opinions about whatever the decision, whatever the best decisions we were making and discussions we were making. What's important too is that that we joined the most intense period of the process, doing the line drawing activities that occurred near the end of the process. We went through several two stages. First of all, we went out and got the public comments and input doing the first, what we call it, rep iterations or visualizations. And then we came back and took all of that information that we were given, as Kathy explained, and came up with a first set of maps that were challenged. Oh, because doing the public hearing process, we aren't all hearing the same thing. So when we made out decisions that was based on the community of interest input that we perceived at the time, each of us separately as commissioners. After making adjustments and really listening to the community, we had over, we had 34 meetings and 1,700 testimonies and over 20,000 bits of information we had to take a look at or at least be aware of. And I wanna say something about that too. We could not have possibly handled the extreme of all we received. We were completed by just so much information ourselves and we really had a very short window of time to digest that information, especially when we had work and jobs and outside of this commission because in most cases, what's not the only thing at the time during that 10-year period. So we had to basically read the information when trains and airports, just wherever the case, wherever we were in transit for the next day and then basically be ready at nine or 10 o'clock in the morning to roll up our sleeves and work to come to some conclusion because we were on a nine month timeline to get these maps through for 144, including congressional senatorial, state senatorial. So we didn't have a lot of time to be mad at each other because we had a job to look at petty arguments. At least that's my perspective. And what we ended up having was a very strange combination of commissioners among us. We had unusual combinations. We had, for example, one Democrat from Ventura County who is basically a worker's rights attorney and advocate are working with a Republican from San Diego, a Pacific Islander. They were separable throughout the process, for example. And we decided, as Kathy said, we were gonna travel to these various locations together as a team to show the face of full commission since we were the very first one in the state. We had another combination of a Democrat, a younger lady from San Francisco, who teamed up with an older established Republican from Capitola and they were just inseparable. So you have these very unusual combinations of friendships that occurred. And I can only express that it occurred because we were not just forced to do so, but for the most part, we wanted to do so. We all had that objective in mind. So there are so many other bonding experiences that I could share, but not to mention that we have Napa Valley and it's a normal Valley wine country out here. So there was a little wine drinking along the way, but mostly we were there to take care of some serious business in a short amount of time. Right, it looks like Andre got cut off while he's getting settled. Colleen, can you talk a little bit about how you got the lightest possible participation for your public hearings and sort of how you avoided just kind of hearing from the loudest folks or maybe the folks who are willing to show up in the middle of a pandemic to the public hearings. How did you get everybody on board? Yeah, great question. Before I address that, I would just wanna echo what Kathy said and what Andre said. And to the extent Michigan can do this in your commission, boy, try to get to know each other as people as has been pointed out. It is fundamental, I think, to a well-functioning and frankly, fun way to go about redistricting. I wish that our commission could have done more than that, more of that. We have a really small commission in Arizona. There's only five members. So a quorum is established with just three people. So because of the open meeting law statutes that we abided by and the very polarized environment in which we were dealing to be frank, we were advised not to trap, we couldn't carpool and we couldn't go to wineries. It would have been great, but we unfortunately really were discouraged from doing anything with all of us present or subset of us for sure because the quorum might be established with just three. So it was tough, I gotta say. And it is so much better if you can all get to know each other as people. And then you understand where they're coming from because I think only then can you then begin to advance and understand, okay, I know this is important to you and this is important to you. Let's try to figure out a way to bring the most of those two things, most two important things together and achieve it for all of us. That's so great. But anyway, so I loved hearing that from California and I wish we could have done more of that. So again, from Michigan, you've got a larger commission and to the extent you're following all the laws and not breaking any open meeting law things, I highly encourage you to do exactly what was just discussed. It's fundamental. So how did we go about trying to maximize participation? So we traveled all over the state similar to what you've heard and what it sounds like you're gonna embark upon. Do a listening tour first and try to hit geographically as many places as you can but also look at some of those communities of interest that you know exist such as Native American reservations and try to hit those towns and for instance, you could be going on these listening tours and be located and have hearings in towns that seem very geographically proximate but one may be on a reservation and one may not and so they have different foci and so it's really, I think important to kind of look at your state and map that out to try to maximize the amounts of different communities of interest that you know already exist, for instance. It's super important to have an amazing website and web technology's gotten better even in the past 10 years. We thought we had a great one. We streamed all of our meetings. Of course, we were all meeting in person and so it's a little bit different but we streamed all our meetings and we recorded all the meetings with a transcript and we post that information online and it's archived so that people who couldn't attend the meetings but wanted to find out what happened could still go back and listen to those meetings. I think having as much advanced notice given to the public is super important. So to the extent the commission can get the word out as early as possible and I noticed you had your list of hearings already with the dates which is fabulous. You wanna make sure that information is communicated as much as people can plan. Trying to think of other, you need to have a way for folks to submit their input of course online as well to that website. That's what we did and so we had requests to speak forms that they could fill out. They could say who they were representing where they're from and then provide their input and they could also submit partial maps or full maps online to us that became all part of the public record. So having that really great portal to the commission really I think is vital. Trying to think of other things that might be useful to mention. So we had a public information officer on our staff and that person not only did a lot in terms of collecting we had a press clipping service to ensure that we were getting input reading what was being said about us and all of that but they could also set put out press releases they could notify the public just put out blasts having a distribution list so that people can sign up on your website if they wanna receive notifications of when the commission's meeting and where they can receive that information voluntarily. I think that's a really useful thing to do. I'm just brainstorming with others, think of other, if California has some opportunities I'd welcome them. Those are some good starting points certainly. Nancy we have some questions about how the public will know this is fair and even some suggestions to make it simpler by just drawing squares on a map of equal population or having a computer just follow some simple rules. I guess why isn't it quite that simple and how will the public know that the maps that come out are fair? Yeah we get that question a lot actually why can't we just have a rectangle the computer algorithm just do it and be done with it? I think all of our co-panelists here will have great answers to that. I think if you look at the process that we've set up here in Michigan you'll know it's fair because it's done out in the open and the public will have access to all of the information that the commissioners have access to you'll know exactly what the inputs are you'll see what the decision making of the commission is that the commission has to talk about all of its registering matters it has to be drawing the maps it has to be presenting the maps all transparently to the public at large it can't be holding any closed door meetings anymore like the legislature has been for decades and it has to justify the decisions that it's making. So once you have approved maps and under the constitution now the commission can only approve maps with a majority of the commissioners so of the 13 commissioners at least seven need to agree on a set of maps and of that seven at least two Republican affiliated members two Democrats and two that are neither Democrats or Republicans need to be part of that majority. So you won't be a you know we won't have any longer sets of maps that only one party favors or that gives one party an unfair advantage in fact giving a party an unfair advantage through the maps is actually expressly prohibited and it's unconstitutional now but we will be seeing a whole new way of map drawing and the ultimate transparency piece I think is what gives us all as voters the assurance that this is now fair, impartial and transparent and now we have the constitution in black and white backing us up. So as a reminder we are going until 815 even though some invitation said we were in to get eight and the video will be available afterwards and those meeting dates are also at the same location at closeup.umich.edu. Kathy we had a related question about how commissioners can get out the positive information about what is happening in the commission how they might combat disinformation that they might be seeing online I know I've talked to a couple of commissioners are worried about the public image of the commission and maybe misinformation circulating is there a way to get around that? Well, that's a larger societal question. I mean, unfortunately there's a couple different things let's unpack that question, the disinformation. One of the things I think that as former commissioner Mathis had suggested that Arizona did and I think California did was to hire PIO as a public information officer to work with the commission to constantly kind of help put out positive information. I think that the commissioners should find ways to appear and speak publicly about what the mission of the commission is and how people can get engaged, right? The more that there are official sources of information the more that people know kind of where to turn to. I think it's fantastic that they've already chosen to appear exactly as they have as California did too which was whenever commissioners showed up they would find a volunteer who was one Republican, one Democrat, one independent, right? Because I think what it tells everybody is we are committed to kind of working together across party lines to figure out what makes sense for the entire state. I think that countering disinformation also means that there will be times when this, because it's highly political, right? And unfortunately commissioner Mathis experienced this firsthand and even in California we experienced it. There are people who will want to try to take the redistricting process and accuse the commissioners of not doing things in fair ways or accuse them of not being fair. And I think if they start from the very beginning to establish rules and guidelines that they're gonna be operating by, right? And those can include things like when we show up to public spaces to talk about the mission of the commission and what we're planning on doing that they're doing it together, right? That they're sending out messages that they're talking about in these events but also that they're really setting up rules where each individual through personal integrity and commitment to the idea refrains from doing things like speaking on their own or acting in a way that would sort of cast us versions on the rest of the commission. One of the biggest challenges that the California Commission faced towards the latter part of the hundred hearings and meetings that they had was there came to be a group of people who would show up to hearings with big signs, which is fine, but also sort of shouting, yelling and disruptive behavior. And what we do know is that unfortunately, our country has experienced a kind of amped up emotion around politics that has driven some people to believe that they can sort of take any kind of steps to make their views known. And what I would say is that for the commissioners you're all in it together. So work out rules and protocol for people to participate, respect that people spend time to come and talk to you and then give them the safe space to share their information. If there are people who are coming to disrupt, you're doing two things. One is you're protecting your own safety but you're also protecting the safety of those people who are coming to speak with all good intentions about their own community. And that may mean sometimes before you get started having some rules of engagement where if there are people who are coming to disrupt or spread this information or attack, that the hearings are not the right space for that and figuring out what to do to remove those folks or give them a different kind of space to air all of those grievances. That's an important set of protocols to lay out especially in this day and age but I think it'll also be important if you lay out what those rules are before you start your public hearings or input hearings where lots and lots of people start to come in. People will also sort of feel like that's right. That's fair. They're treating everyone evenly and whatever the rules are that nobody is being treated with extra time or less respectfully than anybody else and in doing so, you're already setting the groundwork for people to say ultimately the maps that are drawn and the process that was created was fair. I should just say because of that attention to detail on process, right? In the end, the maps were challenged in California. Three times to our courts, two times to our California Supreme Court and both of those times decided unanimously, right? With a majority of judges appointed by Republican governor and then another set of judges who were appointed by Democratic governors but unanimously decided to work for the work of the commission because the record was so clear about the level of public input, the level of transparency, the level of process, right? The fact that the commission really took their job seriously in really respecting kind of what people had created in the initiative process in setting up the commission. And I think that the Michigan commission can do the same thing, right? Set those baseball rules before you get in. What's a foul and what's a strike and then stick with them for the entire process. Thank you. We're nearing the end. We've gotten a couple of questions about of the forum. Can we submit a community of interest of type X? And I think the answer is almost always yes. Partisan, nonpartisan or shared party, not shared party, small, large, different for different districts. But we're also getting questions about the census delay Nancy. So maybe can you address how that is changing the process and maybe also use this opportunity for your take home message from tonight? Sure. So we did hear from the Census Bureau that because of the COVID pandemic and other issues that they do, they are gonna be delaying the release of the census data to this different state. So now we were expecting to get census data rolled out in August of this year and no later than the end of September. So this is many months after we would usually get the census data in a normal year. So that does set us a little bit back and forth in terms of where we'd like to be. And the commission is going to appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court to get a little bit of an extension of the deadline for when they need to approve the final maps. Because under the Constitution, it would have been November 1st and now they will get until they'll be asking until January of 2022. That being said, it is a modest extension. We wholeheartedly support it. We think that the commission is doing everything right in this situation. It's starting with public hearings right away. It's gonna be spending a lot of time getting public input and kind of all of us kind of getting our sea legs under us and working through this process together. And there's a lot of data that it can work with in the interim while we're waiting for the final census data. There's 2010 census data. There's other official government data that comes out of the Census Bureau. So I think we're gonna have plenty of time as a state to work together and to draw a pretty good map. So we're gonna have a good idea for what our maps are gonna look like. And then we'll be gonna be able to kind of plug in the final data once we have it and kind of already be in our stride to get our final maps in time for them to be used for the 2022 August primaries and the 2022 general election in November, which is beyond exciting. And I just think, I hope the audience today just gets a really good idea and the commissioners as well for just what a completely novel, a new way of redistricting we're about to embark on here in the state. I'm really excited. I hope everyone else is too. And I hope that you all, it only works if everybody participates and if the commission gets from each person the information it needs to work with. So thank you so much Ford School and all of the co-sponsors. Thank you so much for our panelists, for participating. I think this is just a fabulous event. And I hope, yeah, I hope we'll just continue to have these discussions and I look forward to a really successful redistricting process for our state. Thank you. Andra, I think your audio was fixed. Any last call to action to leave us with? Yes, yes. I just wanted to say that the most difficult part of the process is the last 30 days or so. That's the most intense process. And it's a short window between the input phase and the actual mapping phase. So things happen very quickly. I think only that happened with you as well in Arizona. And I just want to say finally that, I don't know what happened last time with the mute there but I must have hit it accidentally. But you know, this is an incredible opportunity to educate the public in the state of Michigan. When we began the process, there were individuals who didn't know what redistricting was. I'm proud to say now that the people of the state of California are probably the most educated people or in the nation when it comes to knowing what Jura Mandarin and redistricting is all about. There was some confusion when I started about redistricting and justification. I had to explain, no, that's a total separate process. So now, you know, it's very clearly and widely known what we do and what this process is all about. I want to say too, and just comment on Kathy's comment earlier, this is an incredible opportunity for the people in the state of Michigan to deal with how polarized this nation is and set a positive example. You have this example before you and the world is, the nation is watching. And I have all the confidence in the world that you'll demonstrate just what democracy looks like and how it works in a very sane and sound environment. People are working together as one. So our slogan, for example, in California was democracy at work, bear, representate, especially in today's climate, that is hope that we maintain that. And I just applaud you all. Democracy is not a static process. It's a evolve and you're evolving in the nation. I just thought you in the state of Michigan and I'm glad to be up this program. And thanks for letting me share those final thoughts. Well, thank you. That's a good way to end. We've come to the end of our landmark discussion, one that we expect is gonna lead to fair elections and advance our state. Please remember to check out the great resources from our sponsoring and hosting organizations all linked at closeup.umich.edu. We hope you'll visit those resources and take part in the upcoming Michigan Independent Redistricting Commission hearings across the state. Thanks for your questions, your comments, and your participation. Good night.