 Hello everyone. Will you all please take take your seats? We are going to start the program soon. Thank you very much. I am Madhu Sridhar, the president of the League of Women Voters of San Antonio and on behalf of the League I welcome you all this Saturday morning because it's a very important subject that we'll be talking about and I appreciate the fact that you all have taken the time to come and join us and I certainly hope it is a productive morning for you and you feel that it was worth coming and attending. We have a lot of material that we will be going over. For those of you who do not know the League of Women Voters, I just want to share with you that League of Women Voters is a non-partisan organization. We need the support nor oppose any political party or any candidate. So we are completely and very strictly non-partisan. The mission of the League is to encourage informed and active participation in your government. We work to increase understanding of major public policy issues and we influence public policy through education and advocacy and it is in this spirit that we have organized this forum on redistricting a subject that is extremely important in the upcoming year and we all need to get involved, get educated and you know actively participate in the changes that might be made. This program was organized by the program committee of the League of Women Voters of San Antonio in collaboration with the State League of Women Voters and we have brought an absolutely fabulous panel, Evelyn Bonavita, who is the Vice President for our program and action and also chairs the program committee should be credited with putting together this absolutely fabulous program. The program committee worked very hard along with Stephanie Swanson from the State League to put together this program. So at this point I would like Evelyn to come and tell you briefly about what the how the event will take place. Thank you very much. First of all I'm going to explain to you how to do the parking ticket that you all got that you can get three hours of free parking but you have to take your ticket around the first floor around to the computer section and there's a machine there and you insert your ticket and it stands that otherwise you have a bunch of problems when you try to leave so be sure when you leave here to get your three hours however long I'm I just know that it's not anything that's very clear to people who are coming so please bear that in mind and secondly we're handing out index cards please write down questions you have for the panelists and then we will pick them up and hand them to these nice ladies over here who will be sure that we're not all asking the same question we don't we will not deny anyone the opportunity to ask a question we just want to be sure that not all the same ones I'm here mainly to introduce our moderator Mr. Al Kauffman in your program I hope everybody has one there is a short bio of Mr. Kauffman and I wanted to say that I went online to look him up to see what I could add to it five pages five pages of honors and award publications and incidentally places like Harvard and the University of California so I think he needs no introduction Mr. Kauffman would you like to come up here moderate this this panel thank you very much it's an honor and the lead women voters have been very kind to participate in their activities and highest respect for their work we have a really wonderful panel today and I'm going to introduce them very briefly and I'm going to make a few very short remarks and then they're going to explain all you need to know in two minutes each so please listen listen very carefully and then we'll have our question and answer period I'm going to ask a few questions get started and we'll go from there so I want to introduce them one by one the person directly to my right is Dr. Rogelio signs he's probably the leading Latino demographer in the country right now he's at UTSA used to be at A&M he's moving uphill and so we're very glad to have him here and he is probably the person who will know the most about the changing demographics of the state and where that is happening next to him we have Mr. Jose Garza Jose Garza is working on voting rights in Texas for now about 40 years he was at MALDEF he is represented the Mexican-American Legislative Council and all of the recent rounds of redistricting I know personally he worked in the redistricting in the 80 90 2000 2010 and although he says he might not I'm sure he's going to be involved in 2021 and I'm committing him to it right now okay next we have Mr. Joaquin Gonzalez he's a worked with the Texas Civil Rights Project he couldn't get into St. Mary's Law School so he had to go to Yale Law School but we're willing to accept that he comes from a very famous family in in San Antonio called Gonzalez you might have heard of a few of the Gonzalez's through the years but he's been very actively working on voting rights in the legislature and in the community and is going to work very closely with the league on these future activities next to him we have Stephanie Swanson Stephanie is with the League of Women Voters she is handling for the League of Women Voters this effort called Fair Maps Texas Coalition by the way that's that's not an oxymoron Fair Maps Texas or at least they're trying to make it less than an oxymoron and she works with legislative and advocacy efforts of both the state and national levels. Senator Senator will be here very soon I'll say Menendez he is senator for district 26 which includes this area and is all of north and northwest San Antonio he's a former state rep I think he's on the city council he's now on the senate redistricting committee very active person built on immigration rights redistricting rights and a wide range of other activities and and to hear someone who will be on the other side of the of the panel to ask questions of these hearings I think will be very important for you so basically we're going to redistrict again here's Senator Menendez so I'm going to out him here he's coming in but here he is very good so let me give you just a briefest introduction of what some of these issues are we're going to redistrict in 2021 the redistricting will all occur in a month and a half democracy will be flourishing during this month and a half but the census results the difficulty is you know the census is going to be April of 2020 the census results don't come out until the middle of April 2021 and then the state has to get together and redistrict the state house of representatives the state senate the congressional districts and the Texas state board of education all within just six weeks now the fact is most groups in Texas already have their plans based on the present census information but it's a real madhouse so I think this will be important to have you get more involved in that process so that is why we're here to try to help educate people to get them involved in the process so I'm going to start now with some questions uh for each one of our panelists uh oh what do you say I'm sorry you're right apologize okay I was going to cut off their time and save it for myself but okay thank you okay no uh each each one each one of the panelists gets this two-minute statement to begin with and I think I'll just go down the row the way I introduce them is that okay okay so uh uh Rogelio can you give us your two-minute statement to begin with and then go on the whole safe road all right in examining the issue of redistricting I focus on the population changes that represent the numbers that are used for the redistricting as well as the maps that come out of that that process as was the case in the last census and the one before that and the one before that and even the one earlier than that the trend that we will see in 2020 will be similar and in fact more powerful in in certain respects it'll be the uh what we'll see will be the growth of the state's population is primarily due to growth in its latino and more broadly on its non-white population while white once again will account for a relatively minute segment of the state's population increase in the past republican strategists have created magic out of these numbers taking these numbers that are potentially not very friendly towards their party and turning them into Rorschach like Matt and there are a few others that that advantage whites in the republican party and the disadvantaged people of color and the democratic party I have a data that I'll save for for the panel discussion that'll take a look at some of the population trends that are going on in in in the state but it is very clear that what demographers have been have been talking about for the last several decades is now here so that we find for example in in Texas because of an aging white population we find very very slow population growth as well as in some cases population decline and these is very redistricting is very important when it comes to census to the 2020 census because of the issues that we find such as a citizenship question that has been tossed out that will not be but it's already in some way entered the the conversation as well as the Texas state of Texas deciding not to invest money in the complete count of the of the state's population and so forth these of course are very much tied into the redistricting and the numbers that we're likely to see so we all know that the right to vote is one of the most important rights that we have president reagan for example called the crown jewel of civil liberties in texas though the right to vote is considered and enforced as a privilege not as a right and the people in power decide who is going to exercise that privilege and this has happened historically since jim crow all the way to the president in the 2010 redistricting everybody was talking about the increases in the latino population in the minority population across the state and we were all thankful for that growth because that meant that texas was going to get four more congressional seats to the delegation in the united states congress and everybody thought those are going to include at least two minority congressional new congressional seats and maybe three because after all 80 percent of the population growth in texas was from the mexican-american and african-american community certainly that would entitle us to that sort of representation when the redistricting occurred in 2010 however the state of texas drew one minority one additional minority opportunity district and only after it was sued and reduced the number of latino opportunity districts in the texas house of representatives by a net loss of four districts even though all of the growth in texas had been from the minority community but it's not just redistricting the state of texas almost every legislative session passes laws that restrict the right to vote to the minority community the voter ID law was hotly contested and litigated some of our witnesses included a man by for instance by the name of margarito Lara margarito Lara was was very poor he was very elderly margarito Lara one of the joys of his life was getting up on election day and walking to the nearby polling place and showing his voter registration card and voting and everybody knew margarito everybody at the polling place knew margarito when the voter ID law was passed margarito didn't have the the license or the other ID that he needed to vote and so he missed an election he missed another election and he missed a third election until we got a judgment from the federal court saying you can't be denied to write the vote simply because you don't have these IDs unfortunately margarito passed away so the last three elections of his life he was unable to vote because of the restrictive election laws the texas passed so I just want to I guess go back and build a little bit off of what mr. Kaufman was saying about the process itself for the district dean and as he mentioned they do the census over the course of 2020 but the data itself doesn't come out until between February and April of 2021 and then the legislature the state legislature has responsibility for drawing district maps for four bodies the us congress the state house of representatives the state senate and the state board of education and because of the state constitution the legislature has to draw state house and state senate maps by the end of the regular session which is the end of may 2021 so they only have a couple months that they can do this and if they fail to do that then a group called the legislative redistricting board draws the maps and that's composed of the governor the lieutenant governor the speaker of the house the attorney general and the comptroller and so you know obviously that's probably not going to be the fairest group of map drawers out there so there's a real time crunch there and leading up to next legislative session they hold these field hearings around the state and in the past and they got in trouble in this and the litigation in 2010 that it's just recently really come to a close but it's basically been a useless process part of that is that we don't have data to actually talk about real features of maps because we don't know exactly where the population is there are projections but it's nothing final and so in the past what they've done is you know had these sort semi-useless public field hearings then got into session and ignored everything that was said and done things behind closed doors and rushed things through with no public comment so what we've really been focusing on is how we can improve this process leading up to it to make sure that when the rubber meets the road and they're actually drawing maps it's not the same closed door process and the public and groups have a real chance to give their input into it so i want to build off of walking what he's been talking about and i want to give you a little more background on the public input hearings so the league will always fight to improve the process wherever we can we missed our chance to get reform through in 2019 any sort of reform we would really appreciate an independent redistricting commission like senator menendez filed legislation for we knew that that was a long shot and so now now that we're stuck with the redistricting process that we have we took a look at it and said how can we improve this process here and now how can we make it more honest more open and more fair so these public input hearings are a great opportunity and yes i know that they might not accept our public testimony but we have to try if they don't listen to us we can always take this evidence or i'm sorry this testimony to our state representatives and our state senators and say if please keep this in mind moving forward these are communities these are where they are located so going back to the public input hearings that that texas house redistricting committee decided to hold organizational hearings for the next round of redistricting to come up with a plan on where they're going to have these public input hearings so i show up not many people are there chairman king says he's going to hold three organizational hearings at the second organizational hearing he comes in he adopts a list of cities for these public input hearings without taking any information any testimony from the public like he said he was going to do so we immediately raised a red flag we said whoa wait a second there so on top of that these hearings were going to be held in bowmont luffkin marshal rockport very small cities that not not many people are there and in the meantime our huge metro flex areas houston dallas san antonio austin fortworth they each get one he says yes well we'll come back and we might hold more but we wanted to get them to commit to our metro flex areas because that is where most of our group has been he ignored us again and again we wrote letter i think two letters he ignored us so finally i believe you were involved in the bail in hearing recently in may i got a story in the on the statewide npr about them ignoring us and about them repeating the same mistakes that they were making in 2011 and within a week the press got ahold of their their new uh their public hearing schedule they doubled the number of cities not only that but he finally wrote us another letter and he said that he's going to give us one month public notice for these hearings he's posting notice in both english and spanish now all of our major metro flex areas will have multiple hearings so please help us take advantage of the road and the process or the improvement that we've made moving forward and take advantage of of this please thank you yes let's give a round of applause first of all it was a run in a little lake because there was a breakfast this morning where congressman dogged and former congressman thenzales and a few as a labor or breakfast AFL-CIO and it was funny because at that breakfast he was asked how many times have you been redistricted and it's three or four once known into a district known as the fajita or bacon strip because it went all the way from austin down to the valley yeah is it right there there it is yeah so let's let's let's look at the facts let's let's take emotion at us this is a fact okay if we look at all the votes cast in the 2018 election for congressional candidates republicans received 53 of the votes in texas and democrats 47 percent if all 36 of our congressional delegation seats were divided proportionally to the votes that were allocated by texas there would be 19 republican members of congress and 17 democrats instead texas has 23 republicans and 13 democrats representing us in washington so that shows you that the what why the courts have cracked down on texas drawn maps every decade since the 1960s for violating the voting rights act restrictions on diluting minority voting strength and gerrymandering along racial lines which is why this is so necessary everything that we're doing i don't think i need to tell anybody here that the essence of you know partisan gerrymandering is manipulating the lines around voters to elect whoever your party wants to to be their candidate it amplifies the political party that is empowered beyond what it beyond what it deserves on a vote of of share alone and politicians can influence the elections by how they're drawing district lines by using two main tactics packing and cracking and it sounds disgusting but it is what it is concentrates a large number of packing concentrates a large number of supporters in opposing party in one district so they'll take a democratic area and they'll make it 80 percent as far as much as they can they'll pack as many democrats so there'll be fewer around to have a competitive seat somewhere else cracking dilutes the voting power of opposing parties so there's a lot of information here i've just been given the stop sign i'm glad you're here we have a lot of work to do and we do have i do have some dates from some hearings that are coming up and i think your room does make a difference with the questions i'm going to start with one question for each person and then open it up to all of you there's not many cards yet so be sure to fill out your cards with your questions and i we will get to so i'm going to start with dr sines dr sines what what percentage of the population uh after the 2020 census do you think will be latino we're talking about 30 but by the time we're talking about the 2020 census i think it'll be probably about 40 of the state population will be okay and what percent african-american uh african-americans will be about 12 percent of the the texas population so it'll be officially a majority minority yeah which texas already has been for some time in terms of officially not non minorities or uh uh non-white being the uh the majority group uh just short question for posse garza posse given those statistics if latinos are 40 percent of the population and there are 150 state reps then there should be 60 mix american districts do you think that's the way it'll happen most assuredly not so in in texas uh you know one of the things that the senator was mentioning was how these lines are manipulated and he talked about cracking and packing the states redistricting and the local redistricting have very sophisticated computer equipment that gets down to the block level okay how's that that all right so because of this very sophisticated uh computer redistricting data the math drawers can go down to the blocked level to figure out how to move populations around uh recently the supreme court uh said that political gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of federal courts this so if they're doing this for political reasons there's nothing in in the in terms of the law that you can do about it but texas and its math drawers already knew that they already knew that this was the excuse they could use so when you get down to the block level you don't have political data what you have is racial data so i know we like to cloud these things with partisan purposes but it's always been about race it's always been about race when democrats were in control minorities were the butt of their redistricting when republicans are in control it's minorities that suffer the the biggest burdens of their redistricting so that's a long answer to your question no we won't have 60 districts that are representing minority voters thank you uh mr gonzalez um people are going to go testify before this house committee uh to talk about redistricting what do they need to know about the law in this area or the facts in this area that will really present their case most strongly to these legislative committees one important thing is all the stuff that uh hosea has been talking about the history that texas has been found in violation of the constitution and the voting rights act in every redistricting cycle uh since the 1970s and of course they were in violation before that but there wasn't a voting rights act around so i think highlighting that the public is aware of all of this and we've already seen the legislature take moves like this last session they passed a bill that increased legislative privilege which is a you know for public information act requests when members of the public or the media are trying to get information from the legislature they can invoke legislative privilege as an exception to that and sort of it blew under the radar really this last session but they passed a bill that would increase that you know we saw recently there's this conservative group called alex that uh had you know they go around and recommend things to state legislatures and they were recommending that the legislators destroy all their emails and basically hide all the evidence and so i i think we need to let them know that people are watching this and that we're aware of the tricks that they've used in the past and are going to be demanding that they not employ those same tricks to hide the ball on what they're doing miss swanson uh for you um you're going to be educating people to go to these meetings and talk to the state representatives what do the people going to the meetings most need to learn about how to work with the political process to talk to the legislators and to talk to the senators um well the background on we just routine i think will be very important that will help you get set up a good dialogue and a foundation to work from so i just want to point out really quick my plug in your folders you have two guides one's on non-partisan criteria that the week is very much supporting and promoting and that's very important so going in and talking about ethnic groups is a very good start but in order to have a true community of interest you need to outline other things in your community besides just ethnic groups so i would point out where your schools are where your hospital is and our guide um is in there and it walks you through it and it gives you an explanation and an example testimony basically but then also there's stuff that walking from the texas of laureates project has included as well on stuff that we would like to see them do to improve the process and make it more transparent and inclusive so that's my quick plug i think most importantly though if you go into these hearings and you tell them how this this current map has impacted you personally that is one of the most important things that you can do if you go in there and speak the truth and from your heart that actually makes legislators stop what they're doing and listen to stories so that's the number one thing that i can i can definitely recommend senator menendez just two questions for you the first one i think you have a proposal on redistricting for the legislature can you explain what that is about and why you suggest that the legislature passed that sure and and and maybe you could talk about not this specific proposal but one similar so just so that you know a little bit uh the bills that i filed would have created a redistricting commission to take the process out of the hands of the politicians we studied what california did we studied with colorado did and we tried to come up with a texas solution that it would have precluded any elected official candidate lobbyist staff or any large donor from serving on the commission the commission would have been made up excluded excluded excluded okay excluded anybody that fit in that category the commission would be made up of five people from the majority party five from the minority and four independents the members would have to reflect racial ethnic geographic and gender diversity the map each map would have to be approved by at least nine members of the commission at least three of each majority minority minority majority and independent and outlined a process for public outreach and input including hearings in each senate district which means that being 31 parts of the state and it would be a criteria for districts to include population equity geographic integrity compactness and communities of interest i think look for folks if you want to ask yourself well how where do they practice dividing communities one area i can tell you an area that's just interesting how they've decided they've taken loop 410 and and put half of the castle hills inside one district and in on the north side it's outside one district those of you familiar with the great northwest largest neighborhood association san Antonio along fulebra tazel out in the northwest part of the city at one point they ran the lines in an almost like a like a snake-like version to deviate up into four but the most egregious version is that when the hatred that is shown for travis county by taking and putting travis county which could be one congressional district and putting it into six congressional districts yeah so taking bits and pieces just dividing travis county up and saying we we have such little respect and so much disdain for you that we're not gonna you're not gonna have your own particular congress person to represent you and and that's how they've done what they i'm sorry you had a second one just one more quick question as a member of the senate redistricting committee what do you feel that people come before you need to tell the members of the committee about this process i really enjoyed the comments that came you know one of the things that happens uh many times because we want to make sure we don't forget something we write down like i have our notes and we but the worst thing we can do is read our notes and and because if what i would recommend is that if you if you really want them to see what you've written in terms of you have statistics if you have how it's affected you personally make sure you have a copy for every member of the committee so if you know that you're coming to testify before the senate then you'll know that we have uh let me see i've counted here we have 17 members of the senate redistricting committee so have 17 packets so you hand them out but you tell them i'm not going to read you because i know you know how to read i'm going to tell you what's happened to me and and and that way you'll get more of their attention if you get up there and you start reading line for line and you're looking at your paper they'll probably look down at the paper they might they may you may lose them and and stories are a good thing uh the other thing i would do is recruit someone that doesn't normally vote the same way you do but believes the same way you do about redistricting and believe me there are people who are just as frustrated about redistricting in both sides and independence because we all know that this like this committee the senate committee on redistricting has got 10 republicans and seven democrats but it's important for the republicans they hear from people from their own side saying i don't like the way you pack these districts either because what's happening is the only thing that matters is the primary and so they're they're they're having to run further and further to the right just to get through their primary and it may not be exactly what they want to see. I have a few questions from the audience and i guess we'll we'll pursue from that uh i guess this will be for either Jose Garza or Rogelio um first question was what's the legal constitutional definition of a voting district in precinct the other question is census tracks should there be a requirement that you cannot split census tracks when you draw a redistricting system so uh well how do you want to start with that give it to Jose or Jose you start go ahead um i i don't know that i would be better at answering this question but i'm going to give it a shot so a district is essentially the boundaries of the voters for a particular elected body for city council the precinct could be you know district one but there are you know sub parts of that a voting precinct is the the boundaries of a of a district that show who who the voters are of that particular precinct and uh i think that a census tract unit is so large that in some instances that it would be unworkable to have a legal principle that says you can't divide those uh those units you know one of the things that's interesting about all of this discussion is that all of the rules and principles and ideas that you hear that we tell you uh really are they could be changed in the blink of an eye uh in a courtroom so the district court in san antonio in when it was drawing interim plans because the state of texas's plans were illegal decided that a good government principle that they would apply is try not to divide voting precincts because it when you divide a voting precinct those things have to be redone and voters are accustomed to going to a polling place and being in a voting place and every time you divide up a polling place that causes confusion and so one of the principles that they used in drawing their interim plan was let's try to keep everywhere we can voting precincts intact let's not change those those are small enough so that we can manipulate them and draw districts that can buy with one person one vote etc etc the supreme court reversed them on that united states supreme court says you cannot dictate to the to the legislative body that they cannot split precincts splitting precincts is something that they have the right to do and moreover as i mentioned earlier partisan gerrymandering is beyond the scope of judicial review now because that's what the supreme court of the united states says that was just this june just this june they there's all these lawsuits from maryland from pennsylvania from north carolina all of them in which they showed exactly the kinds or even worse of the disparity that senator menendez talked about that we have in texas on our congressional delegation evidence that was very strong about partisan gerrymandering and the supreme court says that's out of bounds they can do that and the reason i said the state of texas is always known that is because that's the excuse they've always used when they fracture a minority community when they pack a minority community yes we've done that but it wasn't for racial reasons that would be illegal we did it for partisan reasons and by the way we think that's legal and sure enough the supreme court this year said absolutely right it's right for helio yeah there's a another issue here and this has to do with the population that is used to create those particular districts and there has been a lot of there was a court case several years ago that went all the way to the supreme court sue even well that was suing the state of texas and then what she was trying to do is propose that it would be only eligible voters that would be part of we used to construct the political district so it would be individuals 18 and over and individuals that are u.s citizens and you could really see how that that proposal would really shift and would do away a lot of the population growth that we see in the state of texas 86 percent of the growth has been due this decade has been due to the latino population only 14 percent of the white of the growth has been due to the white population so these kinds of manipulation in terms of who constitutes the population that is used to create those districts are are used to try to overcome those demographic kind of shifts and i think that the citizenship question that was thrown out was also used part to bring about an undercount of the population that it now is timid or scared to participate and the other was to also as a step to eventually go back and try to to get that population the eligible voter population to be the population that is used to construct political districts instead of what the constitution says that means everybody regardless of their age uh citizenship etc. um Dr. San, i'm going to follow up just one second on that and then we'll go to uh senator menendez um because of all the discussion about citizenship question on the census uh there was concern that certain populations be intimidated wouldn't want to answer the census there still is going to be some effect from that so can you give your opinion on what effect it would have if if undocumented persons who happen to be latino do not participate in the census both in terms of redistricting and other issues. So uh the the question was proposed by the trump administration and it went through the court systems and so forth and finally uh then it was pulled out just uh what about a month ago or so but the damage has already been done the damage has already been done in the sense that that that was already part of the of the discourse and part of these strategies that are used to inhibit the uh the vote of people of color as well as the poor is to create this confusion as well so in the voter ID people are i don't know if i'm eligible or not but when there's a penalty also if i so it creates all this illusion and and confusion and i think that that has already been done with a citizenship question and in addition people do not trust that they're if they're here undocumented or they have a family member that that uh they're not going to come for them and they're not going to be rounded up and so forth so the the work that we have to do to assure people of the importance of the census and so forth is double as hard or more than it has been in in the previous census and what we would have if if we do not count uh the undocumented population uh as accurately as we had as we can for the state of texas is a major major uh impact we're talking about the representation of uh the state um uh jose mentioned that the last uh uh decennial census uh texas gained four congressional seats right now texas is slated to gain three congressional seats a population demographic work that has been done on if only half of the undocumented population participates in the census that would be reduced to two congressional seats instead of three and we can also talk about the millions and millions and millions of dollars that we're that the state of texas is going to leave on the table if uh if the undocumented are counted and that is not only the undocumented but we're talking about people of color the poor etc that have traditionally been undercounted thank you oh it's tremendous i know because we're in state of texas which firmly believes in democracy have you found that are you in the texas senate going to develop committees full count committee many states my wife's here she's on the national board of common cause in many states they have very active full count committees got there make sure people are counted what can the senate do try to make sure people are counted and and what can you do to make sure your fellow senators are aware of these possible undercounts so both the the texas house we had a say representative file a full count committee bill uh i believe there may have been one in the senate as well the bills never got a hearing because there was not an interest by leadership in texas to have a full count and and what is mind-boggling is that if you look at for example california i believe is investing 150 million dollars in a full count and the reason is that we're and you know when doctor science talks about the millions they may be in the billions doctor science of money that we're leaving so you ask yourself what are they talking about well why what what money are we leaving on the table well cdbg community block development grant dollars and HUD dollars those are allocated on a per capita basis so the city based on the growth that you have in your state that's how much more money you get so that councilman courage and his colleagues can say we need more sidewalks here in this community this park is dilapidated affordable housing needs to be addressed we need to make some subsidies that really have people be able to afford to live in a quality safe place these are the things we're leaving on the table tax credits are being our portion on a per capita basis uh highway dollars are a portion on a per capita basis so we're leaving billions of dollars lying on the table just because they don't want to have uh the the right number of congressional delegates because they they're afraid to lose their their power i mean literally this is all because they're afraid to lose their power so this is a concerted effort in certain states uh where if you look at the the party in power they are not making an effort for a complete count and you look at the other states and the state the not only the state the states the counties the cities are all making a concentrated effort the only good news that i can tell you is our cities and counties and texas are making an effort to have a complete count and me personally and i think some of my colleagues we're doing everything we can to help so i i've said to to the people in the complete count and the census committee uh having to do a san antonio let us know what we can do you know we'll we'll make our resources available we need to do what we can i'll do uh you know psas in spanish i'll go into communities where they'll say i have to say and and the dr science is absolutely correct a lot of families in primarily hispanic communities may have five or six people living in the home maybe more maybe less and 90 of them may be fine in terms of the documentation but there may be one person who is in the process or who just had a document lapse or who's just waiting for a response it is not a hundred percent and the rest of those folks they're not going to put that abuelita or tia or tio at risk they're going to say the hell with that you know keep your census no one lives here leave us alone and then people are going to come and knock and they're going to be like no and it's going to require them to see people who they trust to say it's going to be okay no one's going to come no one's going to know we're not asking the question you don't have to worry about that no one care we just don't need to know how many people live here and the interesting thing is that at the beginning of this country and this experiment that we have that we love is our country the the founding leaders of this country were smart enough to know that they it didn't matter what their status was legally in this country it mattered is how many people do we know so we know where to how many roads to build how many schools to build how many hospitals to build the infrastructure that we need is based on how many people are living here and that's what's mind boggling that politics is is is corrupted this whole decision-making even on how many people live in our country and that's that is disgusting okay thank you very much i want to briefly introduce two people awfully quickly we have Dr. Charles Patrell here who was the leading voting rights expert in the United States in the 70s and 80s and former president of St. Mary's University my wife Olga who's on the national board of common cause and the state board okay and councilman courage is also here so so i i want to make sure we we talk to miss swanson mr gonzalez so let me ask you all let me have started with you mr gonzalez what do you think would be the difference if there was a open primary here in texas as there is i think in california where regardless of party you can enter the the primary do you think that would make any difference and i'll let any other panelists follow up on that miss swanson i have an open primary where people can go and vote in either primary are you talking about the top two primaries that they implemented so that's the top two it's like i think they call it a jungle i thought that was your question okay we have an open primary and i'll let you take over do you want to take that to tell you the truth i haven't given it all that much thought i don't know that i have that much useful okay well let me uh i'll take any of the other panels go ahead this one so um part of my research and i'm always trying to get the week to look into other voting systems like rank choice voting and stuff like this and grace or presidents like no stepney you can't do that so the top two primaries would be a good start um i think to making the plane feel a little more level you'd want to make it more broader than that to make it the top four primary so there was a research that came out of funny enough the harvard business school there was a famous professor that looked at how to optimize any competitive system he his models have been implemented in hospitals and other governments around the world and so he tried to look at our two party system and figure out ways to make it more competitive funny enough for redistricting wasn't really at the top of their list but they really endure stuff like top four non-partisan primaries um the only problem with that because tracy weston who was also on the u.s. port of common cause was in california at the time that that was implemented and he said it's very important though that you still hold on to that dr after your name um because that is a good indicator for people people usually associate with d or r but in terms of competition i i greatly think it i think it would greatly help our our two-party duopoly that we have right now so yeah okay thank you um the next question is sort of a set of questions i think they're related um and i'll start with senator menendez and then i see any of the other panelists um the first question is there's an assumption that latinos would be democrats um why is that the assumption secondly if there's a large area of latinos or minorities why wouldn't that possibly be a g.o.p district and the next the census counts non-citizens why should they be included so i'll let you start with that senator menendez and then the other okay the first one was uh it appears to be a an assumption that well latinos are not monolithic end of story they they pray differently they vote differently they think they're i mean they're just you know lat you're a latino you can be from mexico you can central america you can be from spain you can be from puberico cuba wherever you're not monolithic and so no i don't assume that just because they're latino they practice they they're gonna vote a certain way what i think and what i love about what josec said earlier is that we just don't respect when we're breaking up the communities when we're when we're saying to to a community in well this one's not the best one i mean but the one in the valley where you tell the folks from the valley your congressman's gonna has to live in austin or is from austin four you know four hours away because we said so because we don't respect you enough to give you your own district that that i don't at at the end of the day i want voters to vote however they want to vote whatever but at least respect their communities and so i'm sorry the second and third fourth question well the second well okay well i want to get to the question about the census counts non-citizens why should they be included in the census i thought i mentioned it but i'll re-emphasize it the purpose of the census is to know how many roads how many schools how many public facilities what structures we need i mean the purpose of the census is to count how many people are living in your country so that you know how to appropriately adequate apply resources i mean it would make no sense whatsoever to to divvy up the money let's say on a state by state basis and say montana you have more let's say cows and wild horses and you do have people but we're going to give you the same amount of money we're going to give california or texas where where half the the nation's population is you know california is sitting on what maybe 60 million people texas has got about 30 million people but yet we're not gonna we have to be smart we have to apportion any of you that ever gets stuck in traffic and you're sitting there wondering why am i still stuck in traffic why don't i have the funds why does texas not have a better public transportation system why don't we do things more things like h o v and other things that that would be smarter in terms of moving traffic along and letting people that buy hybrids or they decide they're gonna have two or three people in their car help us alleviate the problem we're just not doing those things and without a proper census count it is almost like just having our head in the in the ground now if you want to follow up on that why non-citizens should be counted in census yeah again constitutionally we're looking at everybody regardless of their age regardless of uh of their citizenship status and and so forth is required to be part of to be counted and i agree totally with uh with senator menendez that it has to do again with the the distribution of funds for these kinds of facilities who rose services etc and in addition the other point is that just like everybody else they're also making contributions in terms of paying taxes and so forth uh regardless of whether or not they're thank you very much uh jose i have a tougher question for you i don't know the answer to this how are inmates treated when they when the inmates and uh i guess in consulate other cities how are they counted so um generally uh the um the inmates so if the population is determined by the the they're counted so if they're in a particular facility on census day they're counted to be in that in that um in that facility and that goes that is part of the population of that uh general area but it's more complex i mean so we're here talking about redistricting and i assume that these questions are aimed at that particular task that we're going to have in a few years and a lot of times inmates are not included in the count for a redistricting plan i mean that sometimes there are specific um decisions made to exclude them in in the counts but they're in the population i mean so a jurisdiction would have to take an affirmative step to exclude them from a redistricting map but they would look at a at a at a area and make determinations about what the population of that area is not i don't know what the legal consequences of that would be because i don't think that that's been litigated yet but if i might uh the prior question i think had sort of a redistricting angle to it that i think we've missed in our answer so far and about non-citizens being included in not just the count i i think it's an easier argument to make that everybody should be counted because there's all sorts of reasons that we do for establishing a census but then the the second question second tier question of that actually was raised as as rohello mentioned earlier in the evanwell case what is the base population that we use for redistricting and it also implicates the inmate question do we use non-citizens and how we decide to allocate power and divide into districts and there is an argument that reached the supreme court in the last redistricting session that argued that only citizens or only voters should be included in the redistricting process and the supreme court said well the state of tech that was a case specifically out of the state of texas because the plaintiffs in that case were arguing that only citizens should be used in the population database that we're going to use to divide up our population to create districts and the supreme court said the state of texas has made the decision to use total population and it's within their discretion and therefore the plaintiffs lost but it left open the question if the state of texas decides on its own to use only citizen and only voter data the supreme court has not ruled on that and why is that problematic because there was recently a report of a social scientist a political scientist who was a hired by a very conservative funder who funds lots of republican and conservative campaigns he was hired to do a study on what would happen if you used only citizen or only voter population to draw districts and he used texas as his model what would happen in texas if texas had only used citizenship data or voter data to create districts and what he found was that we have 36 Hispanic state representatives we would have 30 if we'd only used citizenship data and one of the things that he said in his paper was jurisdictions that want to do this that want to limit Hispanic voting that's what he put in his paper are disadvantaged because we don't identify citizens in the questionnaire for our census that's where the origin of the census question give us your citizenship came from from that study from that professor who was hired by that funder the underlying purpose of that question was to limit latino opportunity at the voting box and it was based on a study modeled on texas okay thank you very much mr. amaya you wanted to talk we explain a little bit more about the inmate question for us please but i just want to add on to that just really quick so our state constitution and walking is the one that pointed this out i think our state house districts have to be based on total population just to kind of give everyone a reassure you guys we're thinking about that problem heavily a lot but our state house districts most likely have to be drawn based on total population so that's one good thing yeah just on the jail the inmate population issue this i think it was in 2010 this actually makes a big difference so states have leeway whether they count their inmates as residents of the jail or as residents in their home counties wherever they came from before they were incarcerated and so for instance in 2010 harris county had 25 state representatives and it was just on the border uh for the state house they do it they portioned them by county and to the extent possible all the districts have to be within a county and so harris was just on the verge between 24 and 25 because relative to the rest of the state it had lost some population and if they had counted inmates across the state as at their home residences which makes sense i think because that's where they're going to return that's yeah well and i think they do it differently based on it's not every inmate but inmates that are temporarily incarcerated if they counted them at their home then harris county would have been big enough to keep its 25th district and if they didn't which is what they didn't do and counted them in the place where their inmates then harris county lost a district and so that's what happened and that was i believe majority minority district they ended up combining and running to incumbents against each other and decrease the number of minority districts in harris and other states have laws that they have to count them in their home residents but it's not and it's something i'm pretty sure not set out by law in texas but just a policy choice each redistricting cycle so this again is something that folks could weigh in on either now or during the redistricting process itself so the state league actually worked to get legislation filed last session with eric johnson a representative out of dallas um it was a prison jury mandarin bill that is referred to this process as so right now what the census bureau is going to do with that prison population is to allocate those prisoners and count them at the prison where they're located so districts like representative cody harris um out of huntsville or up in that region there's another one over there and i can't remember who it is their districts about 10 to 15 of their district is prison population so it negatively impacts the quality of the representation of those constituents and it gives that district an outweighed voice so people in those districts have 10 percent more voting power than the everyone else in the state and that's going to impact both democrats and republicans alike and so we pushed hard again to get legislation passed last session uh representative king the chairman of the committee was also interested in in addressing it but come come yeah push comes to the show and you didn't want to do anything at the end i want to go back a second to the issue of counting the undocumented senator menendez uh if someone goes into one of your offices you ask your staff to ask them about their immigration status before you offer them any services absolutely not so so regardless of the regardless of the count in terms of the people you represent if the undocumented or not counted you're going to have to represent them and you're going to have more people in your district than other centers well here's another question i don't ask people when they come in with a problem are you a democrat or republican are you an independent do you vote do you not vote how do you pray are you stray are you gay no i don't ask any of these questions right what's the problem and how can we help you so so um the other thing that's offensive is that you know the supreme courts decided that we're going to be an in in my opinion a forward-thinking intelligent country and we're going to educate children when they show up in our schools because we know that we either educate them now or we incarcerate them later uh and and so uh now there are questions i mean you know now there are questions about that people are bringing these issues up you know in yesterday the governor tweeted that that was a liberal decision by a liberal supreme court i mean it was it's so sad to see the short-sightedness of this i mean where do we end up i mean this is a country built by immigrants it's just ridiculous i'm sorry okay listen i we're we're running short on time i wanted to give each one of our speakers a little two-minute final statement uh so to make sure that any any issues that would come up they might have a chance to address they can do you know it's hard especially for lawyers to speak two minutes um but so uh except for me uh okay so uh dr sands i think i'm gonna begin with you if you have like a final observation to what we've covered today and we'll go right down the line the issue having to do with uh with redistricting uh and one of the things that we've been talking about tectas but we're also uh in terms of san antonio the similar kind of trends that you're seeing here in in san antonio the data suggesting for example that here in san antonio about 92 percent of the growth will be due to the non white population again primarily uh latino 72 percent is about 15 percent for african-americans but we see these similar trends in dalas we see it also in houston the one place that is a little bit different is austin thanks to uh gentrification that has taken place you also there's where you really have one that uh differs uh i think a non-white account for about 60 percent of the growth uh whites for about 40 percent of the growth but that is a one metropolitan area that differs from the other so these are trends that we see uh the population increases and what is going to be the outcome uh we've seen it in the past i think our voices need to come together the pressure and so forth to try to make sure that we have more equitable representation will say so first uh let me thank the league of women voters for inviting me to this forum i appreciate that and thank you to all of the rest of you here who have participated in this those were very intelligent questions and we all appreciate your input on this um you know uh frederick douglas said power gives nothing without demand in my career i've taken that to me and i have to sue everybody but but there's another way the way that the league of women voters is proceeding and asking for reforms i don't necessarily agree with all of the proposals that are being put on the table but i think it's important for citizens to participate in the political process and make intelligent demands on our elected officials so thank you i two observations i guess from this last legislative session um you know i think it's there's a it's certainly an uphill battle to try to get a fair redistricting process out of texas uh but you know two things that senator menendez was worked on and was supported this last session and we saw that the secretary of state's office attempt this voter purge of folks that they were claiming could be non-citizens but in reality were citizens and they just used a poor process and it was a new secretary of state that came in and did this um and on the legal side uh we represented the league of women voters in maldev and lulap was involved and we succeeded in stopping that but you know i think everybody i don't think there had ever been a gubernatorial nomination not confirmed and it just was sort of an unheard of thing but the senators because of public demand um came together in coalist and said they weren't going to stand for somebody who came in on day one and tried this and was unapologetic about it and similarly uh there was a senate bill senate bill nine that would have done a lot to criminalize voting over criminalized voting make it harder for disabled and elderly people to vote and again this was a top priority of the leadership but with public participation we ran a committee hearing past midnight on it on the house side uh we were able to coalesce and defeat that and i don't think anybody going into that battle thought we'd be successful in that so it does make a difference participating so as you've heard from all the stories up here um it's important for us to be involved especially right now so on that note though please stick around the next 45 minutes or so of going up until the noon hour we're going to be doing just a basic 101 on redistricting and walking you guys through how to prepare testimony that's how you can make a difference right now uh please stick around but all of these stories are very impactful and things are really bad right now i think that's probably why you guys are here we need your help we need to be collectively fighting back so please stick around to help thank you thank you to everyone thank you to legal women voters thank you to now cast for making this possible not just for those of us here but everybody they can watch later now and later if you want to go back and hear the coverage look many times uh you know i've i've been told that stories tug at the heart but often many people don't think of that as data or analytics now data can be informative for many people find it boring so but when you combine data with a story now you have something that possibly can compel action this is where you can come in into place we need to have a combination of uh you you know sometimes we call it a one-two punch no most news coverage will and money pours into federal elections a presidential everybody gets excited about that us senate congress but you know what people don't realize is that local state elections is what influences gerrymandering to a long large extent who's your state representative makes a big difference you are we're we're nine seats away from possibly having a balanced legislature where there'd be some checks and balances if we could take control of the texas house then now you have to have a you know some maps that at least make sense or we won't have them at all you know we have to do we have to think about this long term and just you know just as if you didn't already know how bad gerrymandering is you know let's talk about it protects incumbents not always a good thing limits competition increases polarization of very bad thing creates odd shaped districts to capture the desired results and in it in the worst thing it robs the voters of their choice it's the politicians making choosing the voters not the voters choosing the elected official just as a part of information there's going to be a redistricting house committee here in in san antonio on september 12th representative inamine hadez is on on that and the first uh senate committee will be october 29th at 9 a.m in the capital uh and uh we'll be happy to provide you more information as you need it thank you all thank you thank you very much on behalf of the league i want to thank you all very much for being here a wonderful question please stay uh this is going to give you some remarks about this next step and i thought the questions were good the panelists were wonderful and i enjoyed it very much thank you all i think al has made half my speech i was going to say the same thing so i will not repeat you do want to thank the panelists for joining us and sharing your expertise and your uh you know experiences with all of us thank you all for joining us uh and i also want to thank uh professor kaufman for moderating this important forum if you have submitted a question that did not get answered please feel free to come and ask anyone of you know you can talk to them but please do stay for the second session this which is the this was just the warm-up the next session is really how to you know you can participate and make a difference so the breakout session will be next that will be led by stephanie swanson so please do stay and she will be giving the instructions for that so i just want to close the first panel discussion for now thank you all