 All right, good evening everyone. We'll get everyone seated here and just want to welcome folks to our event this evening, our forum. So this is the, well first of all, I'm Lucas Farrick, member of the Davis City Council. I am a member of a group called Saving California Communities that actually we formed during the Great Recession sort of about 10 years ago now back in 2009. And it is a group of YOLO community members who've joined forces to advocate for adequate and effective resources for our communities. And that was really, it was pretty basic at the time. But our communities, whether it was the city, not just the city of Davis, but cities, cities, counties, schools throughout the state were feeling the dire effects of the Great Recession when staffing levels were being slashed did not enough resources to actually cover city and county and schools budgets and such. So we were at the time found just, wow, that's not good. We, sorry about that. Don't know that I'm not sure that that was me. So might be an omen of a time has passed or something. You want me to do the, okay, let me, I'm going to switch to this hand, this wireless mic. Great, okay, so we'll see if that, we can avoid that loud noise again. So as I was just saying, saving California communities was founded about 10 years ago as a group of citizens that was just engaged in trying to make sure that there were adequate resources for our communities and really help sort of make some progress at the state level in terms of the legislature as well in terms of advocating for fiscal reform and again, of course, adequate resources and funding for our various local governments here in Yolo County. So we are really happy to have you all here this evening. I think we have a great program for you. The title of tonight's event is Shaping California's Future and it's a public forum on redistricting and the redistricting process. I mentioned a little bit about our history, would just say a couple of key folks that are here with us this evening who also participate, but Susan Lovenberg, a longtime Davis School Board member and who also works for California Forward, Don Saylor, Supervisor Don Saylor, also founding member, a number of other folks who are here, Jan Agee, Shuei Cheng, who else is there, some of our, oh, Davis Campbell of course, and Bob Agee up here in the front as well, all co-founders of the Saving California Community's Group. I wanted to just also quickly thank a couple of our partners this evening. Firstly, the city of Davis, appreciate the city's support of this event. Also, Davis Media Access is here this evening, always a great, our community media center here as a partner with us, recording this event to be used in the future and played back on Davis Community Television in the future. And then also, California Forward is a partner. California Forward, most folks know, is a non-partisan and non-profit organization, statewide organization that devoted improving the performance of government throughout California, so appreciate all of the support from our partners as well. And then I just wanna do a quick introduction of our panel and then we'll get going. And really I think the 2020 redistricting process is something that we really are, I think there are a lot of questions about, there's a lot of excitement about, and there are really ways to get involved in the process as well. So with us this evening, we have four panelists. The first is Public Policy Institute of California Research fellow Eric McGee and he's gonna be talking about how the 2010 cycle of citizens redistricting affected elections. Nicholas Heidorn, director of redistricting for Common Cause, California, speaking regarding voter suppression in gerrymandered districts and efforts underway to extend citizens redistricting to county, supervisorial districts throughout the state. Margarita Fernandez is the chief of public affairs for the California State Auditor's Office, which has responsibility for conducting outreach to ensure widest possible applicant pool as well as facilitating the formation of the 14 member Citizens Redistricting Commission. And then the chair of the last speaker will be a chair of the 2010 Citizens Redistricting Commission throughout the state and former, certainly Yolo County resident, but former Davis City Council member and school board member, Stan Forbes is with us as well, speaking to the importance of applying to serve on the commission. And so with that, we're gonna have each member is gonna have approximately 15 minutes to speak and then we will have an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. And so first up is actually Nicholas Heidorn on the gerrymandering topic. Thanks so much. I don't know if you want this one or you want that. Thank you. Thank you to everyone for having me and thank you all for being here. My name is Nicholas Heidorn, as was mentioned, I'm the director of the California Local Redistricting Project, which is a joint effort of Common Cause and McGeorge School of Law. And I'm also the legislative advocate for California Common Cause, which is the capacity that I'm here in today. For those who don't know, Common Cause is a nonpartisan, non-profit, good government organization. We advocate for election, campaign finance, and voting reform. And in fact, redistricting is something that our organization has worked on since the 1970s. And it's particularly fitting to be talking to you here about California's redistricting because it's possibly, it is actually the most successful state when it comes to reforming the process. So what I'd like to talk to you about today is kind of set the table a little bit. What is redistricting? What is its importance? And why did California move away from having politicians draw lines to our independent commission process? And why that's important? So first I wanna start with a basic overview of what is redistricting? As many of you probably know, redistricting is the once per decade process where election district boundaries are modified so that they have about equal population. We tend to think of redistricting as applying just to state legislature and Congress. It certainly applies there. But redistricting actually applies wherever you have election districts at any level of government. So if your city council is divided into council districts, they need to redistrict as well every 10 years, same with your county board of supervisors. Redistricting is particularly important because we need to ensure that everyone has about equal representation in government. So redistricting is actually mainly done so that if one district has a big growth in population, another district has a drop in population, the size of those districts, the amount of people in them would get really uneven over time if we never changed the districts. So every 10 years we bring the districts, we force those lines to be changed so that you have equal sizes. Kind of the principle of one person, one vote is being brought together through the redistricting process. But of course, in kind of explaining this, I like to think of what did we do before redistricting? Cause actually we have a little bit of a test case. Until the 1960s there wasn't a requirement for state legislatures to redistrict. So what did that look like to give you a sense of the discrepancies that could happen? It used to be that Los Angeles County with its six million people got one state center and three rural counties in California with only 14,000 people also got one state center. So when you think about it, you had six million people represented by one person and you had 14,000 people represented by one person. So proportionally one person's vote was worth 450 times more if you lived in a rural area than an urban area. So with redistricting, we equalize populations to account for that. And who redistricts? And this is really the central point of my discussion and largely what you'll be hearing from today. In the rest of the world, redistricting is done by nonpartisan staff, the rest of the democratic world, or it's done by a commission. The United States is pretty much the last, one of the very last remaining democracies where we have the peculiar approach of allowing incumbents to draw their own districts. So the state legislature draws state legislative districts and they also draw congressional districts. Now you may be immediately thinking, that's a little bit odd. The people who get elected get to then draw the districts that they get elected in. If you think that's a little bit odd, you're right. It is a conflict of interest. You have people who have the power to determine who's voting for them to then get elected in it. So it's kind of the people, the elected officials choosing their voters for their voters have an opportunity to choose them. And so to understand a little bit on what can happen when you have that, some of that script bounced over. When the redistricting process gets abused, it's a process called gerrymandering. So that's when lines are drawn to accomplish a political goal. That can often be to disenfranchise a political party, but it can also be done for more personal reasons to help an incumbent hurt a challenger for other reasons. Gerrymandering is not new. Gerrymandering goes back to when districts existed. So even the name Gerrymandering, for example, goes back to Massachusetts in the 1800s where you had a governor, Eldridge Gary, who drew lines to disenfranchise the Federalist Party and the local press thought those lines looked like a salamander. So it was called Governor Gary's Salamander, which became gerrymandering, gerrymandering. So that's where our term gerrymandering itself came from. But of course today with powerful computers, the ability to gerrymander is much more sophisticated and much more powerful than it has ever been before. So let's take a quick look at what that means. North Carolina for right now is an example of a state whose lines are being litigated at the Supreme Court because a really extreme version of partisan gerrymandering. So the Republican-controlled legislature drew what you can kind of tell here on the map pretty extremely contorted districts. And they drew it for the purpose of essentially disenfranchising Democrats and maximize Republican gains. So in 2018, just this past election cycle, Republicans and Democrats were about in a dead heat. Each side got about 50% of the vote. But when you look at the congressional delegation, the Republicans won about 80% of the seats. So 50% of the votes, but 80% of the representation. And that's because they drew the districts in a certain way to give themselves a super majority advantage. And we know this wasn't just random chance because they actually declared on the record and this is what they're trying to do. So here's a great quote and this is again said on the record. I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats. Because I do not believe it is possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats. So the reason why it was drawn this way is because we couldn't make it even more advantageous to Republicans. There's just no way to do it. gerrymandering though is not just something that affects one off states. It's really something with national implications. When you have elections, you of course hope if one party gets more votes, they should see more seats in office. But when you have gerrymandering, you can sever that political accountability that elections are supposed to have. You can make it so that election results do not match how people are voting. So in this past election in Congress, we've of course heard that there was a blue wave. Democrats had huge increase. One of the most highest increase in voting percentages for a party, I think in like a generation or so. But what's interesting is their gains were almost entirely 75% almost in states where the lines were not drawn by the legislature but were drawn by courts or by a commission. And so the New York Times actually ran a headline that said what's more powerful than the blue wave? gerrymandered districts because in states where the districts had been gerrymandered drawn by the state legislature, you barely saw an increase in terms of representation even though the vote increased there to similar degrees that it had in other states. So I wanna shift now. That's kind of an overview of gerrymandering. Let's talk about California. How did we get to our commission and what were some of the impacts that really led us down this path? California has its own history of gerrymandering and I like to start in the 1980s though it actually dates back further than that. If you talk about the 1980s, you had a democratic legislature and a democratic governor and they drew the lines to really maximize democratic gains. So one example of this was with the congressional delegation before redistricting. Democrats and Republicans were about even in terms of the size of congressional delegation. But after drawing pretty strongly democratically leaning districts, suddenly their advantage jumped to adding 10 additional seats after redistricting. And in fact, this too was not an area where people were trying to be modest or hiding. The Democratic Assembly member who's in charge was a guy named Phil Burton who said that the districts were his contribution to modern art, which was how kind of contorted the districts were to accomplish this result. Fast forward to the 1990s and something interesting happened. You had a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature. What that meant though is they couldn't agree on a plan. They deadlocked. No maps could get passed. So it got booted to the courts. So the courts redrew the maps and because the courts didn't have self-interest in how the lines were drawn, 1990s are largely seen as one of the fairest redistrictings that California's had. And what you actually saw in that process is competition came back, elections and how people were voting really mattered. So for a brief period of time, for example, the state assembly actually changed party hands twice in that decade because the election districts were much more responsive to how the voters were voting. And then we get to the 2000s, which is the final spark that led to the creation of our commission. In the 2000s, you had what's called a bipartisan gerrymander. What that means is the Democrats could have tried to draw the lines to maximize Democratic gains, but instead what the incumbents wanted is they wanted to be safe. They wanted no competition. They wanted to ensure that there was no chance that they would lose. So they made super Republican Republican districts and super Democratic Democratic districts. So what this essentially was was all the incumbents agreeing, let's just not actually have a competitive election for the next decade. And it worked. It worked extremely well. So if you look at the congressional races in that decade, 255 elections for Congress, only one seat changed hands out of 255 elections. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a, who ended up being a big proponent of redistricting forum, had a great quip where he said, there was more turnover in the Habsburg monarchy than there was in our elections during this time. So to give you an example though of how incumbency protection not only just affects how our democracy is proposed, it also has impacts on the ground. So here's a cut out of one of those maps from the Long Beach area. And I wanna point out just a few quick things to show how this also has impacts on how democracy is experienced. Here you've got a strange little finger jutting out from the district. What happened is the incumbent lived right here. So she needed that little finger to keep her inside her district. Another interesting anecdote from this district is you had one incumbent living here in Compton, but he had a ranch with horses down here and he wanted the horses to be in his district. So the district was caused to snake across so that his horses could be in the same district as his house. The consequence of this though is that the city of Long Beach was split into four different districts. And what happens when cities or in communities are split is it reduces their voting power and their influence because proportionally you become a much smaller share of any elected officials vote that he needs. And what that does by diluting your vote, you dilute your influence, you weaken accountability to organic communities as well as cities and jurisdictions. So the real consequences to this type of splitting. So all this led to proposition 11. So in 2008, common cause along with California Forward, League of One Voters, ARP and later additional groups got together and put together a ballot reform to create California's Independent Redistricting Commission that we have now. The central guiding principle of the Independent Commission and this is in the findings of Proposition 11 was it is quote, that quote, allowing politicians to draw their own districts is a serious conflict of interest that harms voters. The whole idea of the commission was to try and take people who have no interest in how the lines are drawn, people who are vetted to not be extreme partisan, people who are everyday California to come from different parts of the state have them look, study what the map should look like and with that fair eye, be able to come together and draw the maps. So some of the key elements of the commission, open application process to any California, there are a lot of strict criteria for who's eligible but primarily designed to take typical political operatives out of the equation from serving on the commission. So if you've been a candidate for office, for example, or if you're a major donor, you can't serve on the commission. It's also structured to be bipartisan. You have five Democrats, five Republicans and four others. And to adopt a map, you need a majority vote of each of those three sub pools. What that does is no party can steamroll the other side. Other key elements are multiple hearings. You'll probably hear from the commissioner how many they had, but it was several dozen hearings up and down the state. And there have actually been studies on how much the commission tried to accommodate local perspectives on what their communities were. And it was a pretty high degree of people who proposed actual map poll comments. The commission actually adjusted their lines to reflect it. So this is really something where seeing a commission that doesn't have a vested interest and brings in public participation that's meaningful and actually counts for something. Finally, it had very strong and clear criteria to guide the commission on how it should draw its lines, things like trying to keep cities together, trying to keep communities together. And that's a really important check against gerrymandering and also it gives everyone a common goal to strive for as they create these districts. So there's a lengthy application process you'll hear about, not lengthy for the applicants, but lengthy in terms of how the vetting is done, but you're gonna hear more from that from the other panelists, so I'll skip over that. I'll go straight to the results so that you're gonna hear even more from one of the other panelists, but essentially what academics and scholars have found is that the commission did do a much better job than the legislature in terms of partisan fairness, in terms of not drawing lines to try and entrench incumbents. The commission did a far better job in terms of really objectively measurable things like not splitting communities, not splitting cities. The commission also did a better job than the legislature had done. In fact, if you see this little award down here, the commission was recently awarded an innovation award from Harvard's Kennedy School for really being a national model and to most reformers really the gold standard for how redistricting should be done. What's been really particularly inspiring to see is with the success of California State Commission, you've also seen this reform start to percolate in other places and that the popularity and kind of the philosophy independent redistricting has also really taken root. So in Proposition 11 was first passed, it barely squeaked by about 51% of the vote, what's interesting is there are multiple attempts to either repeal the commission or expand its authority and with each vote, the public's affection for and belief in independent redistricting grew stronger. So repeal the commission 60% against and in fact 60% voted to increase its mandate. An attempt to undo its maps was rejected by 70%. And then there's even a field poll asking how people approve to the commission that had 75% approval rate. So the more people got to know and get familiar with the commission, its popularity grew. One area that I'm particularly interested in too is to see this commission model really expand at the local level. I'm not gonna go too much into this because my presentation's mostly on the state, but I do a lot of work on local redistricting where we have a lot of scandals and problems as well. And so before the state commission, you only had two local redistricting commissions. After you had 14, we now have LA County, San Diego County, City of Oakland, City of Sacramento, Long Beach. There are actually more local commissions. If you added up all their population, it's bigger than all but five states. So not only have we succeeded at the state level, but this is really a philosophy that has been extremely adopted at the local level. And there's even a bill right now in the state legislature to require large counties to have to have independent commissions. And finally, the state commission is really percolated across on the national level too. You now have nine citizens commissions in the state. There were four ballot measures just this past year to try and either create commissions or strengthen the redistricting process. So this is a movement that is growing nationally and with a tight deadline since redistricting is right around the corner. So with that, I'll kind of just conclude by saying the reason that California's commission was so successful was in part, obviously, its structure and its process, but it also owed to the fact that we had excellent commissioners. And for the commission to be successful going into 2020, we need that again. So we need good people to apply and good people to be appointed to the commission. So if you're interested in redistricting, and truly this is one of the most, I think fulfilling public services, you could really think of. You're determining for the next decade what representation will look like and that it'd be fair in California. So if you're personally interested, I'd urge you to apply to the commission if you're part of an organization. Consider having your organization also help to find applicants or encourage people to apply because it's a wonderful and very important thing to do. So that, thank you very much and I'll pass it on to the next speaker. Thank you, Nick. You know, that noise that happened earlier made me think of when I came in here, I set my bag down and that noise happened just at the moment that I set my bag down. And it made me think of that. Have you ever seen that, the third Indiana Jones movie where there's the guy in the library who's like bonk and every time he slams down his stamp, the Indiana Jones like takes this big piece of metal and pounds on the floor. And so the guy thinks that it's his stamp that's making the noise anyway. Just reminded me of that scene. So I wanna talk a little bit about what came out of the commission. So Nick talked a little bit about the structure of the commission and where it came from. This is kind of what it did. So as was just mentioned, the districts that the citizens redistricting commission had to draw, there was a list of criteria that they had to follow when they were drawing their districts. And it was actually a ranked list. So that if criteria conflicted with each other, they would have to go with the item that was higher ranked on the list. And those items were equal population, which actually is something mandated by the courts. So whether they had put that into the law or not, it would have been something required for the commission to do. They had to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Again, that's federally mandated. So it would have been something that was required. But it was something they put explicitly into the law because they wanted to make sure that minority rights advocates could feel assuaged on that point and not be concerned about what might come out of this commission. So there was actually a number of items that had to do with making the districts that the commission drew be respectful of traditional geographic criteria. So they had to be contiguous, meaning they had to touch at all points. They had to be compact as compact as possible, meaning as close to sort of circles and squares and sort of traditional shapes as possible. And respectful of communities with common interests, the sort of communities of interest as the term of art in redistricting. They were also supposed to, when you're talking about the legislature, there's twice as many assembly districts as there are Senate districts. And they were required to the extent possible to have what they call nesting. That is the assembly districts, two assembly districts showed to the extent possible be embedded within a single larger Senate district. And now again, this was a lower ranked criterion. So if it conflicted with other things higher up, and as you see it did at one point, then they had to go with those higher items, but it was certainly on the list. And then they required no favoring parties or incumbents, sort of a negative criterion. In addition to these things that were listed, I think it's fair to say that there were some partisan outcomes that were hoped for, but were not expressly put into the law. And one of them is that the plans were fair to the major parties. So regardless of whether the commission took into consideration partisan advantage or partisan interests, that the plans that came out of the commission would be relatively balanced. So by fair in the sense, we mean no large gaps between the share of votes that a party would receive and the share of seats that that party would get for that vote share. And I think people were hoping that there would be a number of competitive races because one of the things as Nick talked about was that the existing plans were extremely uncompetitive. Not much turnover happened. And so people were hoping, hey, can we get some more districts that could flip one way or the other? So by that, in what I'm gonna show you, I mean districts that kind of fall in this sort of maybe 45 to 55% range in terms of their vote outcome. So got on this long list of things. How did they do? I didn't done a bunch of analysis over the course of the last almost 10 years looking at what came out of the commission. And I wanna go through it in these pieces in terms of first the voting rights. And so to get it out of the way, the equal population requirement is a so stricter requirement and is so consistent across states that it's not even really worth looking at whether they made the districts equal in population. It's a really important thing that every district does is to equalize the population across districts. But it just sort of goes without saying that if they passed the plan, it had to meet that criterion. So we're kind of looking more for other things on that list that they accomplished. And the first is whether they both respect of the Voting Rights Act and actually actively improved minority representation. And the answer is yes. So this is just showing you the number of districts that had just one metric, the number of districts that had majority minority population. And minority is a little bit of a squishy term for California now because there's actually more Latinos than non-Hispanic whites. But nonetheless, we'll just use it as shorthand. And you can see that the number of Latino districts actually increased quite a bit. This is across all three plans, the Senate plan, the Assembly plan, and the Congressional plan. You can see that the number increased quite a bit. And there are actually not much change for African-Americans, but considerable change for Latinos and the first Asian-American assembly district district of any kind in California history. Did it split cities? So one of the things was try to avoid splitting cities between multiple districts. So this here is the share of all cities. And when we did this analysis, we looked just at cities that were small enough to be contained within a single district. So there's a lot of cities obviously that have to be split. So we set those aside because the number of such cities that can fit within a single district actually has changed over time in an appreciable way. So looking at just the ones that could be embedded, we see actually some improvement. So we want these numbers to go down if the commission is doing a good job. And for the assembly, it does go down. It's pretty flat for the Senate. And actually for Congress, it went up just a little bit. So I think the overall story here is that there isn't actually tremendous change in terms of the number of cities that are split, but on balance is probably a little bit down. You get a similar story for counties. Here, this is just the raw count of counties that were split. And you can see that actually quite a big drop for the Senate, but not as much change for assembly in Congress. Probably the best conclusion to come out is that there was maybe a modest decrease in the number of splits, but not a significant change. And that's just because the reality is the number of cities and counties that were split in the old plan, despite the fact that there were a lot of really ugly-shaped districts, was not all that high. It just, you didn't split that many in the first place, and then the reality is that you have to draw some for the criteria that are higher up on the list. You have to draw at least a few districts that are not boxes and nice-looking shapes. So getting into that point, which is how compact are these districts? Are they, again, are they sort of shaped like squares and circles and boxes? Or are they kind of all over the place and squiggly do they look like salamanders, right? And there were a number of very strangely shaped districts in the old plans. And this is one of those places where they actually made quite a considerable improvement. So this is just one measure of compactness. There's a bunch of different mathematical measures of compactness that are out there. This one, it goes from zero to one, and the closer you get to one, the more compact it is. So you can see that across the assembly, the Senate and the Congress, there's an improvement, and for a Senate and state Senate and Congress, there's actually a considerable improvement in the compactness. And that comes from just the eyeball test, too. If you look at these plans, they look a lot more compact. Again, it's not that there aren't some districts that have funny shapes, but people don't live in squares and circles. So if you want to respect equal population across districts, and if you want to also respect the Voting Rights Act, you're going to end up with some slightly odd shapes, but it's considerably better for these plans than before. Actually, one point that I haven't been mentioning as we go along here is I'm showing three different numbers. This is the old plan here. This is the one that they initially, the commission initially released in June, I guess it was July, anyway, and then the final plan that they adopted in August. And there was actually a lot of feedback that they got at this stage that helped them to modify the plans for the final passage. And so there were some changes. And we haven't seen, there was, the biggest change that came was that they got pushback on the number of minority representation districts that they drew. And so they made a much stronger point of drawing more of those types of districts and making sure that there was more representation for minority interests in the final plan. And so what did that do? One of the big things that, the big costs of making that change was nesting. So in the first, so here's the number, this is just telling you on average, how many assembly districts do you have within a senate district? The higher this number, the less nesting you have. It should be, if it's, if it were perfect nesting, you had two assembly districts within every senate district, that number would be two. And in the old plan, you see it's not even close to two. It's well over six. So they just kind of, the senate and the assembly plans crisscrossed each other all over the place. For the draft plan, it actually got remarkably close to perfectly two. So under three, just a little bit under three. And that's amazingly close to perfect nesting. But then they did get that pushback and they adjusted. And one of the things that was sacrificed for a better minority representation was that nesting. And so the final plan was better than the old plan but was not as good on the new plan. And again, that's actually to the commission's credit because the nesting was lower down on the priority list. So they were not supposed to put it as high up as the Voting Rights Act. The final thing I wanna look at here is this question of partisan outcomes, both the partisan fairness and the competitiveness of the plans. So this here is, for the assembly, this measure of partisan fairness that I developed called the Efficiency Gap. And if it's zero, by the efficiency gap, a zero is a fair plan. And what you can see is that over time, so that you get the sort of bluish line is the rest of the United States for lower chambers in the rest of the United States. And then the orange line is California. And both before and after the redistricting, here's where the lines were drawn. Before and after, there's a slight tilt toward Democrats but nothing too significant. And in the rest of the country, it's maybe a little bit of a tilt toward Republicans. But by and large, you don't see a lot of, there's a lot of bouncing around here and you don't see any sign of a clear and obvious difference between the two. Or for that matter, a significant shift after the redistricting, which is another thing you might look for. And it's worth noting that partisan fairness is different from competitiveness because you can actually have a plan where one party isn't wildly out of whack in terms of the seat share it gets for the vote share it receives, but there's no competitive districts, right? And you could have the reverse too. You could have a lot of competitive districts but one party is getting, you know, 80% of the seats for 55% of the vote or something, right? So they are different concepts. And that's why even under the old plan, you saw a reasonable partisan fairness and that's because the old plan was a bipartisan gerrymander. It wasn't meant really to favor one party or the other. It was meant to prevent seats from changing hands. So the Senate, you can see it shifts around a lot more. That's largely because the Senate has fewer seats that are up each time. So in the nation as a whole, again, it tilts maybe a little Republican here. It's kind of bouncing all over the place, but maybe tilts a little bit Democratic, but no clear shift across that redistricting line. And then the same thing is true for Congress. This sort of one outlier year in each decade but no clear trend. Actually what you see in for Congress is, if anything, after redistricting in the rest of the country, the plans became considerably more Republican. This is just looking at the share of seats that fall between that 45 and 55% range. So this is just one possible measure of competitive that you could use. Just saying, is it close to that threshold where it could tip? And here you see that there is actually, so in 2008 there were a number of competitive races. Not many seats actually flipped, but there were a number of competitive outcomes. But otherwise in the old plan, the districts were pretty uncompetitive. So there were just not that many that fell within that range. Consistently been a little bit higher for the assembly after the, under the new plan. Same basic pattern here for the Senate. There's been this one year in 2008, it was much higher. And then a little bit more competition for the Senate as well. And so I think for both the assembly and the Senate, we can say the competition is a little bit higher. Not dramatically higher, but a little bit higher. But for Congress it's much more of a noticeable change. And really out of the three plans, Assembly, Senate and Congress, the Congress plan, the congressional plan was just epically uncompetitive. I mean, you can't even, like if you look at that old plan, it was just kind of amazing how perfectly they separated it into Republican districts and Democratic districts. Just really, it's really wild to look at. So you can see that there just really weren't that many competitive seats. It's been noticeably higher. There's been a lot of turnover in the congressional delegation as a result of these plans. And so that's been a notable change. So overall, on the required goals, the things that are actually written into the law, the CRC produced plans that have more minority representation and are generally more geographically, we respect traditional geographic criteria more explicitly than the old plans did, which were all things that they were supposed to do. On the partisan outcomes, I think they're about, the new plans are about as fair as the old plans, maybe with a slightly greater Democratic tilt than the old plans. And then the new districts are more competitive than the old ones, though I think it's worth noting that, races, Democrats live in one part of the state, Republicans live in another, so it's actually hard to draw more than a handful of competitive districts. And it's worth keeping in mind that they actually didn't look at partisan data when they were drawing their districts. So the competitiveness that comes from these plans is sort of a happy accident of the process that they followed. And that's it, thank you very much. I'm actually bringing my notes up here, I'm sorry. I have to remember dates. So we heard from Nicholas about the history of redistricting and from Eric about some of the outcomes of the last time we went through the redistricting process, and now I'm here to talk about how we're going to shape California, the future, because we are now in the process of actually trying to figure out or trying to form a new commission that is going to be actually drawing the new lines. And so someone in this room perhaps, or someone you know, or someone in the room that was here, happened to draw the lines last time too. But perhaps there's someone here, or someone you know that will actually be shaping California's future for the next 10 years as well. And anxious to see what happens in the next time we listen to Eric talk about that. So my name's Margarita Fernandez with the California State Auditor's Office. And let me see if I can do this. I have a few things on my agenda, and I'm probably going to gloss over a few things because Nicholas talked about a few things that I had in my presentation, so did Eric. And I mean the great thing is that we're all talking about redistricting. And 15 years ago, not many of us were talking about redistricting. So this is really exciting. Last time when we went through this process we had to go through initially to educate people about what redistricting was, and mostly because many of us didn't know much about it because it was kept out of the public. The legislature did it behind closed doors. We didn't really know what was going on. So we already know what redistricting is, what its importance is, and how California changed the whole redistricting process. So now the independent 14 member commission is actually the entity that's charged with redrawing the district lines every 10 years after the census is taken. And they'll be drawing formats, the state senate, the state assembly, the state board of equalization, and also the congressional districts. And what also happens is that we do have a commission right now, the 2010 commission, and Stan is here with us, Commissioner Stan. But it's actually a brand new commission that will be drawing the new lines. So every 10 years we'll go through this process. And so that's probably why you wanna apply now because if you don't apply this time and you don't get on the commission, you're gonna have to wait another 10 years before you get to apply again. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about our role. The California State Auditor's Office, I know somebody was grimacing about the auditor being in the room. I just wanna clarify, we do not audit anyone's taxes. So we won't be looking at anything here. Actually, our office is an independent entity, we're nonpartisan, and we're free of legislative and executive branch control. We do perform conduct audits, financial audits as an external auditor for the state of California, but we also conduct performance audits, operational audits of state agencies, local governments. We have authority really to go into just about any publicly created entity. But we conduct our work in accordance with standards and I believe that's probably why our office was written in the initiative as the entity that will be charged with selecting the new commission every 10 years. And it's because of a nonpartisan office and being a trusted voice for California. So our role is conducting outreach, which is one of the things I'm trying to do right here right now. And the first time we went through the process, we also had to draft regulations with what was approved in the initiative. In fact, Stan and I were just talking a little bit ago. When we conducted our, or wrote our regulations, we went up and down the state to discuss what the proposal was. We listened to various organizations who came to provide public input and so that we could craft those regulations in a fair and also nonpartisan way as well. This time we just had to update, revise, abuse it and minor things, but we didn't have to do a whole lot because not much had changed with the law. We do are required to conduct the application and the whole selection process for selecting the commissioners. And then also now there is one change that happened in between 2010. And now is that the Secretary of State initially was responsible for assisting the commission in establishing and having some support before they embarked on their own. And now our office is charged with that. So we'll be responsible for assisting the commission when they're formed, helping them get started, making sure they have pens and pencils. I understand they didn't have that last time, but I promise we'll make sure they do have that. But the commission, when it's fully formed and fully functional, functional will be its own entity and will operate independently and will conduct their work as they see in accordance with what's required, but as they see fit. So the role and who they are, as Nicholas mentioned, right now the law is that the 14 member commission, five members will be from the largest California party, which right now is the Democrats, and five from the second largest California party, which right now is the Republicans, and then four who have no party preference or belong to a different party. Again, they're responsible for drawing the four maps that we talked about. And the commission needs to be formed by August 2020. So you're probably thinking, why are we starting now already? It's kind of an extensive process. I think I'm gonna skip to one. It's kind of an extensive process, and I'll explain a little bit more about that. Now, the role of the commission, as Eric talked about, they have different criteria, they have to hold public meetings, they have to listen to community input, and they have to follow criteria when they're drawing the lines. I won't go into any of those because that's something you've already heard about, but it's mostly so that you know that they have to go through the process. They can't go out there and just start doing whatever they want to. So they do have criteria and they have to follow that. One of the things that we will be doing for the commissioners is that we know that they're going to need attorney almost right off the bat. So before the commission is selected, we will be already soliciting applications for an attorney. We won't select them, but when the commissioners are formed, when the commission is formed, we'll be able to hand them the application so that they can review them and select them on their own. So this is where we start selling the commission. If you haven't been sold already, because you know that there were really positive outcomes, there's great opportunity for civic engagement and just something, like I said, that happens once a decade. So to be a commissioner, you have to have voted in at least two of the last statewide general elections. You also have to have been continuously affiliated with your party or if you didn't have a party preference, that same affiliation as well for the previous five years. And then the conflicts of interest that were created mostly to keep the politics out of it, as Nicholas talked about. So for example, some of the conflicts of interest include if you work for or were appointed to or work with under contract with a state elected official or a congressional elected official, then you're not eligible to apply. Equally, if one of your bona fide family member works for or contracts with they're not, you're not eligible to apply. Again, these are intended to keep the politics out of it and to ensure that the commission is really just focused on doing what's good for California and creating fair and equal districts as well. The other criteria, as far as who should be applying, and this was specifically in the proposition when it was passed as well, is that we're looking for people who have strong analytical skills, who have the ability to be impartial, and who have an appreciation for California's diversity demographically and with the geography as well. I mean, and that was in part because the commission should be formed with citizens from throughout California and they should be reflective of California and that was the intent of the authors for the initiative. So we're hoping that you're very interested in the process. I think there was an application selection process information sheet in the back. But the first thing, so if you're interested or even if you know people who are interested or if you wanna spread the word about it, Shape California's Future is our campaign and you wanna go to our website right now and sign up so that you can receive email notifications. It'll be at that site, that website where we initiate or launch our online application process. There's on the back of the postcards as well. Yes, thank you. The application process is going to start really soon. Just a few weeks away, actually is it 12 working days away? I can't remember exactly, I think we were counting down. So it's a two-step process, two-step application process. The first one is fairly easy to complete and there's a 60-day window for people to apply and it's basically to self-report, see if you meet the minimum eligibility requirements but you need to go through that phase first to then be able to continue the process which is the supplemental application process. Now that one's a little bit more extensive and we will be actually providing a copy of the application for the supplemental part 30 days before that application period starts which will be in August. And that one is a little more extensive. A lot of people have said the last time how complex it was and I'm not sure if it was so complex but the whole process of redistricting is complex and it's exciting to be able to be part of shaping that part of, or having an impact on every community in California. So it is a little lengthier. We're trying to get at the analytical skills, the ability to be impartial and the appreciation for California's diversity. And we're also trying to make sure that that those conflicts of interest are, if there are any, are identified early rather than once you pass on from that process and go into an interview part. So we're trying to make sure we vet all that during that process. And during that time we'll be conducting webinars, we'll be going to speak anywhere, anyone wants us to speak, conduct a workshop, if you need any assistance in completing that part. It will also require some letters of recommendation but throughout that process, the application process, it will all be held, it will all be a public transparent process. We'll have everything online so that the public can be involved. We want the public to provide input if you know someone who's applying and you think they'd be a great commissioner, let us know, send us a public comment. Equally, if you know someone that's on there and you think they may have been dishonest about their eligibility, let us know about that too. What happens next after the supplemental application period is over, an applicant review panel will be reviewing all the applications. Now the applicant review panel was already appointed, selected in our office actually a couple weeks ago. They had to, the requirements for being on the panel was that you had to have 10 years of independent audit experience with our office and that one of the panelists would be a Democrat, one would be a Republican and one would be neither of those two parties. And it was a random drawing similar to what's going to happen at the end in forming the commission. So if you're interested in knowing who's looking at the applications, we have that information online on Shape California's Future. And so there's a little bit of information of each one of those panelists. So they will be going, they have the task of going through all the supplemental applications and all the material and the public comments and identifying the most qualified applicants. All the meetings will be public meetings, they will conduct all their business, make all their decisions in a public setting. So we'll livestream all the meetings, we'll post the agenda and any information they'll be looking at 10 days ahead of the meeting. We'll also pass on any public comments that we receive on any of the applicants that they will be reviewing. We'll have a cutoff date of course, because they have to have time to look at it, but we'll post that information online as well. So initially what they'll be doing is they'll be identifying 120 of the most qualified applicants and it'll be 40 from each of the three sub pools. And when they identify, when they get to that point, they will be calling them in for an interview. The interviews are also public as well, they will be live streamed as well. And then ultimately identifying 60 or 60 of the most qualified applicants. 20 from each of the sub pools, again, live stream. So we're not quite done, we won't be quite done. There is one part where the legislature does have a role in this selection process. And the legislature, when we identify, when the panel identifies the 60 of the most qualified, we will provide that information to the legislature. The four legislative leaders have an opportunity to strike some names. And if they exercise all their strikes, which is to each, they will return to us the names of those candidates, those applicants that are still in the pool. So there would be at least 12 of the most qualified in each of those sub pools. And then at that point, the state auditor will conduct a random drawing and will randomly draw the names of the first eight commissioners, three Democrats, three Republicans, and two that belong to neither of those two parties. And then once those first eight commissioners are selected, those commissioners will then select the remaining six. And they're supposed to consider the diversity of the commission in making that final selection. I think I probably skipped ahead. So right now we are, like I said, conducting our outreach. We were trying to raise awareness, as much awareness of the opportunity to apply ahead of time. Again, that we will begin on June 10th will be our launch. We plan on hosting a few press events in different parts of California. And I know some of our other outreach partners are also going to have some events to really raise awareness and try to get the word out about the opportunity to apply. One of the things we learned last time is that it is incredibly important to have community-based organizations and nonprofit organizations help us spread the word. I know that many of you in this room, many that participate in many of these community organizations know many people and have a great network. And you are a big part of helping us spread the word and identifying eligible applicants. Part of the difficulty the first time around was, number one, that people didn't know what their redistricting was, so how can they be interested. And number two was really trying to get people because people that haven't been involved to get involved because we couldn't have people who had been involved in politics in the past. So we were really trying to get people that were on the sidelines to get into the game. And so groups like this or forums like this is what's really going to help us reach those people that we know that every one of us knows are eligible and would do a great job at drawing the lines. So we've also contacted all the university, well almost done contacting all the universities, but we contacted quite a few. They're sending information out on our behalf through like alumni newsletters, hopefully some of you've already been getting some of that. The libraries are all on board every county. The libraries are on board as far as, number one, they've been posting information about the opportunity to apply. And number two, they have made a commitment to ensure that there's computers available in case people don't have internet service. They can go to a library to fill out an application. So I am going to close with, visit our website, shapeCalifornia's future.auditor.ca.gov, sign up to get our email notifications. If you want us to come and speak at any forum or a meeting, let us know, and please help us spread the word. And if you're interested, I am encouraging you to apply as well. Thank you, Nicholas, who was doing that, but I think Stan's going to do even better jobs than that. So I am going to leave it to Stan now. So this is like old times, I get to take the microphone away from Stan. It's one thing to listen to folks who are experts and who can tell the story from an academic perspective and a public policy perspective. And it's kind of another thing to listen to the reflections of somebody who's known to us here. We're very lucky that we have knowledge of one of the people who served in this very illustrious group of the first 14 on this commission. They started with 36,000 applicants in 2010, 2011, when this process went forward. And through all that winnowing that's just been described, they got down to 14. And Stan Forbes was one of those 14, one of the eight that was chosen by the lottery. So he's been able to touch history in something that's a very unique and exciting change that's had an impact not just in California, but all across the country. And I think even internationally as people start thinking about how to best divide and represent and have a really strong democracy. So Stan was a school board member here in Davis, a local business owner, a downtown business owner, a bookstore owner with his partner, Al Zeta who's here as well. So thank you for being here. He's an attorney, an almond grower, and he served on the Davis City Council as well as on the school board from 1996 to 2000. I think Stan was a Davis City Council member. So we have this unique opportunity to have one of us speak and share his reflections on how that went, what it was all about, what really happened, and whether it's something that we ought to, I think we all know we ought to continue it. But just Stan, thank you so much for being able to come and share with us. And I hope another day of the site gets picked for the next commission. Well, much of what I'd normally say has been said, the history of it and the selection process. But I wanna talk a little bit about the meaningfulness of it. This, I mean, in this case I'm speaking of all my commissioners, there's 14 of us and I'm the chair right now. I've actually been here for a while. This is a meaningful thing. This matters. In 1962, we were told about how we got the one person, one vote, that was a Baker v. Car case that came out of Tennessee, one person, one vote. But what it didn't do was give you one person, one meaningful vote. Because Jerry Manning steals your vote. It's as simple as that. And I'll give you an example. In Georgia, and I'll tell you about a lot of states because I've had occasion to travel to a lot of states and make the same kind of presentation. In Georgia, 81% of the districts are uncontested because they're so badly Jerry Manning. They've taken the people's right to vote away from them because of the Jerry Manning. And that's not at all uncommon. It's true in Virginia, it's true in North Carolina, it's true in Pennsylvania, it's true in Maryland. It was true in Michigan and these are places that either I've been or other commissions have been. The point is is that, and the public wants to have a meaningful vote. But I will tell you, having been to these East Coast states, there's a lot of venal politicians who just don't wanna give up power. They just don't wanna do it. In Pennsylvania, there was a wonderful woman there who's leading a charge to have Pennsylvania redone. She, I mean, I wouldn't wanna be against her. She had 18,000 volunteers that she recruited. She had gotten, she'd had 400 public meetings, this is as of last year, 400 public meetings. She had gotten 250 local jurisdictions to petition the state legislature to put some kind of commission in place. Well, it went to the appropriate committee in the state legislature and they couldn't get a hearing because he said, and it was a he, I'm not interested. And that just stopped it cold. We are, as Californians, we should be grateful, I mean incredibly grateful that we have the initial process because it wouldn't happen in California. When we sat down as a commission, the first eight of us, we had a yellow pad and a pencil. That's all we were given. And everybody within 10 blocks I was told, which means the legislature wanted us and expected us to fail. They wanted us to fail. So they could take the power back and they did not expect us to be successful. But we were, I mean, it's really interesting to go to these coasts and talk to various groups and testify for the legislature. The California commission are regislings rock stars. And the way I could tell that, there's a Schwarzenegger Institute at USC which is promoting reform. And Arnold, Arnold, my friend Arnold, invited us to come down and participate, basically recognized, and I could tell that we had made the rock star staz with him because he wanted to have his picture taken with me. Not, and the other five commissions he went. But the point is he wanted his picture with us, not us with him. And he, and I had one of our commissioners go and smoke cigars at his house. And it was quite something. The, this is truly an independent commission. And people don't realize how independent it is and the legislature just bristles at it. But the legislature has no authority over us. They cannot remove us. They must pay our bills. And we can write legislation that they can't change. They don't have to pass it, but they can't change it. And that's why actually the next commission is gonna be appointed in July because one of the big problems we had as commissioners was the time of crunch time. The commission was seated December 31st, 2010. We had to have the maps done functionally by the end of July of 2011. We had seven months. We had to create a state agency from scratch. We did not do that. In fact, we are all delighted that the auditor's office is gonna take over the process from the beginning because talk about we had to wait till we were seated and then we put up the RFPs for the lawyers to apply. I mean, that's just really hard to create a state agency. And then we did, we had 34 public hearings throughout the state. We had 70 business meetings that were also open to public. We had 34 specifically to get community information. And that was such a gratifying thing because as they talked about, it was a bipartisan gerrymander with one seat changing hands at the congressional level. Well, we got to go out there and ask people, what do you want? What do you think your district should look like? This is being, we had one old gentleman said, I've been voting for 40 years. This is the first time that the government has ever come and asked me, what do you want? I mean, that's just not the way things are done. And so some examples of how effective they were or how effective the process was. Let me just say that we viewed ourselves as nonpartisan. We're five Republicans, five Democrats, four declined to state. But in fact, if you were to talk to us and ask us what our political views were, you would not be able to tell who was Republican and who was a Democrat and who was an independent. We were interchangeable because the people who got picked were basically good government types. Let me talk a little bit about the selection process from my point of view. I just read about this in the enterprise in 2010. You know, I've been civic, why not? So I applied, simple as that. And the first part, the process, as I've explained to other states, is that the first part of it was give it a conflict of interest because that just kills the process and people think you're on the take. Then it just, the map you draw, they won't have any confidence in it. So that, and you also, part of that, you have to reveal every single thing about your life, about your finances. I had, at that point, I had a 2,000-dollar loan out to our son, Alex. I had to list that. Every single thing that you did, are you, your whole family had done. Had to be exposed, if you will. And I think that did discourage some people. I've heard that in the Asian community in Los Angeles, that was a deterrent. Because they're not used to having all their life exposed, their finances exposed. Then you go into the process of, what are your qualifications? What do you know about diversity? Well, that required, we wrote four. This is a debate where we wrote four or five essays. I don't remember which. And I think there were a thousand words long on these various topics. What do you know about California? What about diversity? Why is diversity important? Now, remember, there was a question I was asking in the interview. What's the importance of diversity? Why does diversity matter in California? And I said, well, I'm quite sure you could find, and even then, I'm older now, but 14 old white guys with beards who could draw perfectly legitimate maps. But people wouldn't trust them. Because we're not, California's not made up of old white men with beards. It's important that the picture of the commission, it's a bumper sticker. And we have to look like California. And as a consequence, when we picked the final six, we had to balance, they talked the random selection. The random selection was to use the California lottery machine to pick the first eight. We wrote our names upon our balls and rolled down and we came out. And so we first wrote, it was a lucky eight, those of us as opposed to the elect six. But we ended up with a commission that looked like California. We had four, we had two Asians, one Pacific Islander, one South Asian Indian. We had one Native American, we had two African Americans. We had four Latinos and we had three Anglos. We had, the original commission had eight men, six women. We had seven Southern California, seven from Northern California. We also had income diversity and that was intentional. We went from a minimum of 35,000 to a lot more, a lot more, but the five of us owned businesses. A couple of us, there's one law professor. There was a guy who ran the US census twice under Clinton and Bush. We had a guy who was the chief research engineer for Raytheon, the cruise missiles, you know, they go fly on your window. He did the electronics and those. We have a woman, one woman who's in San Francisco, Cynthia Dai. At the time she got the job, she has her PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering. She was teaching a class and she's engineering at Berkeley and was flying to Beijing to teach at the University of Beijing. She was, had two jobs, if you fly across Pacific. So it was quite a group and I'm sort of, I still have been sort of going, why the hell did they pick me? But I was the only farmer. So maybe that was my, and I was the only bookseller, so maybe that was the occasion. Anyway, so that was a selection process. Let's see, what do I got here that I had? Because Nick, I said, get told a lot of my stories. Let's see. Back to the process. It was very satisfying because at the hearings, everybody got two minutes because we had 23, 2700 people come to the microphone and talk to us. We had 23,000 electronic communications. We all read them all, sort of the men, and we learned a lot about the city of California that we would never have known and anybody drawing the lines absent these public input would never have known it. That was the second thing, conflict of interest, but also it was vitally important that the public be engaged. They had a chance to come and tell us what did they think their district should look like? Couple of examples. The former districts and the 2000 districts went east west in the San Joaquin Valley. So the foothills were subsumed pretty much by districts out of the San Joaquin Valley. They came to us and they said, please draw us a foothill district because our issues are not their issues. They're caring about water supply, chemicals, so forth and so on, transportation. We care about recreation, forest fires, watershed, those are our issues. And so we went, aha, we can do that and we did. There was another one which we chuckled about. I mean, everybody knows the Napa and Sonoma wine industry. This is the easy district to draw, so we drew one. They came to us, oh no, oh no. Great district, except the warehousing of our wines is an integral part to our industry. So therefore, but the warehouses in the district and we went, aha, and so we did. We would never have known that. There was a couple, another one which was a more environmental one and talked about Long Beach being broken up into four districts. We went down to Long Beach and we had people, seven, 10 is a freeway that goes out of the Port of Long Beach. Terrible air pollution as a consequence of all the diesel trucks. But the people who live there never had a representative and they came to us and said, draw us together in the district so we can have a representative that we can go and we can say, can you do something about the air pollution that these trucks are causing? We would never have anyone to know that kind of stuff. So it's incredibly satisfying to have, I mean, it's small de-democracy in the world's best way of doing it. Again, I just think it has ever, ever, ever been a legislative bill that's gotten that much participation and when we actually were drawing the lines, the lines were drawn in public. We spent a month in McGeorge Law School drawing maps and we would draw a map and they could make real-time public, everything was online, translated seven languages, live streamed, we could have no private meetings of any kind. I'll tell you a story about Lois Wolk in a minute. They could call us on the phone, I mean not, they sent email, send calls on the phone. They sent us emails saying, would you consider doing this? And we'd talk about it as a group in the public eye and we'd move the line or not, as the case may be. As I said, everybody got their two minutes of fame out of a microphone. Well, we had a very difficult issue in Los Angeles and it's just hard. The Voting Rights Act was written for a black, white world that was the South. But that's not California. We have Asians, we have Latinos, we have African-Americans, we have Anglos, we have Jews, we have gays, we have a whole variety of groups we have to try and take into account and see that they don't get split up and that they get represented. So if we really had wanted to follow the Voting Rights Act, we could have reduced the African-American representation by one at every level. However, Maxine Waters came to us in her two minutes and she said, don't do that. We have coalition districts here. We can elect three African-Americans as representatives of our choice, just don't cut our political power. And one of our commissioners said, I didn't get on this commission to reduce, using the Voting Rights Act to reduce African-American political power. That was not my goal. And so we were able to keep the districts. So they have lots of stories like that. Then force, I mean, as I say, we are rock stars. I went back to Harvard in May of 2017 for a competition for the most creative, innovative political thing that had happened in the United States. And there are 500 applicants. And 11 of us went back as finalists and we won. We won $100,000 to go proselytize. So it's, even for the commissioners, it's been enormously exciting. 10 of us have been able to participate. We always send a team of three because again, we are not partisan. We rotated our chair of each meeting so it wouldn't give the impression that we were favoring one party or over another. We did not look where they come as live. We did not look at registration. Our goal was not to make it competitive. That was not a goal. And the reason we oppose making it competitive because once you make it competitive, you're picking winners and losers. And the commission was not gonna do that. That was not our job. As I've testified to several state legislatures, I say two things. One, these seats don't belong to you. They belong to the public. Well, it's interesting the response you get. There was, I was in Maryland, I guess about a month ago now, testifying the state senate. And I would say at least several of the senators were just nodding in agreement. These are the public seats. I had one guy turn these back to me. Told you a lot. He didn't think so. The other thing is, and I did this in Pennsylvania, but I started out in my presentation saying, we don't care who wins. We just want the public to have a meaningful vote. Not caring who wins, it was just something that just, not in the worldview. I mean, that's the only thing that matters is who wins. So I say the public just, you know, the public really doesn't care. The public must just have a meaningful vote. So we've been, well, I've been to six states, Pennsylvania twice, Virginia twice, just get back in Virginia, North Carolina. And, I'll say Pennsylvania, I've been to Tennessee, but it's fascinating to watch the Vanality. There was an effective voter registration in Tennessee recruiting African-Americans in 2018. The legislature, at that point, decided it was going to be illegal to do voter registration drives of more than a hundred people. That became against the law in Tennessee. Or in Pennsylvania, I particularly like this one, there they refused to adjust the lines. So there was a lawsuit brought into the state Supreme Court, under the state constitution. And they ruled in favor of the, hadn't been Democrats. This is a bipartisan activity, however, it depends on who's in the legislature. So the court changed the lines. The legislature at that point sought to impeach the court. That was their response. I don't like what these court did. So I don't care about the Constitution. I don't want to get rid of these judges. Anyway, I've talked about too many stories. You're gonna, this is not an easy process. I'm sorry, it's not. The first part is, but the qualifications, the essays were hard because you really want to be careful about them. And you really wanted to show your stuff if you can. In fact, that's been a complaint we've gotten is that the essays make it too hard. It cuts out a whole bunch of people. If you don't have writing skills, then you just have to look. But you could expect to work like a slave for seven months, which is what we did. I took one day off between January 1st and July 31st, one day. And that was when I was in Ventura, and we had two meetings. So I just stayed in Ventura because there was an open day there. It's a lot of work, but you will never have a more gratifying experience. And I really do encourage you to apply. I mean, it's a scary thing. And unless you win another grant, the job is largely over when you draw the lines. In fact, we had a lot of trouble with legislature. Come on, guys, you gotta fund us because they say, why do we have to keep funding you? And we only get $100,000 a year, which isn't much. It's because if somebody files a lawsuit against us, five years out, which they have the right to do, you can't recreate the agency. I mean, there's other things, and there have been lawsuits along the way. There's not very important lawsuits, but they've been there and some, they have to defend them. And so for the most part, the job is largely over, except for using this grant money, but it is incredibly rewarding. And all of us on the commission think, just are just, it's life-changing. It just is, because you know you have done something that is important, and California is the gold standard. Like I told you a lot of reasons why that's the case, but we are the gold standard, and we are understood to be the gold standard. Michigan just passed an initiative this last election, and I've got to talk to them next week about how you implement it. Because they did almost exactly what we didn't accept. Our selection process was so much more complex than they wanted to do. As long as you've been registered and voted, they're gonna pick them right at random, a random selection, which I think is kind of scary, but that's the way it goes. That's what they're gonna do. And it's because our process was so thorough. Anyway, I've talked way too long. That's sort of the life story of being a commissioner, and it's just been wonderful. I'm just incredibly grateful for the opportunity. Thank you, Stan. That was inspiring from all four of you. This is, we have a few minutes. We're kind of at our time, but I wanna make sure that we have an opportunity to ask questions of this group. This is an amazing gift that we have to have this caliber of speaker with us this evening. And this is timely because the applications for the commission are due June 10th, I believe, from the open period starts June 10, and it's open for just about two months. So that's right around the corner. So, and this is one of the best ways to get the word out. This, by the way, is being filmed by Davis Media Access for later broadcasts, so more people in the community will be able to hear about this opportunity. Anybody have a question that you'd like to raise at this point? Yes, sir. I'd like to ask Eric about the competitive districts and how the jungle primary fits in with that. So what I was showing was just the outcomes in the general election, so it's not really, the easiest answer is they're separate concepts. So you could imagine that if the jungle primary, the top two primary was producing candidates that were more attractive to both sides, that there might be more competitive races as a result of that, but the analysis that I've done suggests that there are more competitive districts, of course, but that it's really a function of the redistricting and not the top two primary. The top two primary has had other effects, but not on that sort of general election competitiveness, so. Very good, Norb. Good evening. I really enjoyed the presentation. I started following reapportionment in 1980. I went to work for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in 82, and we were part of Phil Burton's San Francisco machine at that time. You don't know how happy I am in 2000, 2001, Kathy Fang from, we call it Stuart Quo's, legal center down in LA would fly back and forth to help draw the district because we really wanted to create one Asian American district either for the state senate, for the state assembly, and when I saw that number one figure, all that hard work over two decades really meant a lot, and I really thank you for the presentation. It was really worth the commission that made that possible, too, because the 2001 plan, they explicitly avoided drawing districts like that. I want to give a shout out to Kathy Fang. I've worked with Kathy Fang a lot, and she's the common cause director in California. In fact, I asked her to join me at the Harvard presentation because I was gonna say, here's how come we're so wonderful, and this is how we're gonna be able to spread it around the states, and in fact, as we've gone to the other states, we largely have dealt with common cause. Excellent. Very impressed with all the things that have been brought to our attention tonight, but there's one thing I'm really worried about. It's the fact that all the numbers that we've got here and all the trends and so forth, they're all based on the census, and I'm wondering if the census is going to keep up with you guys. I worked as an interviewer in the 2000 census, and when you're in the middle of it, you realize how much is missed because you're right in the middle of it, and you can't find these people, and the census is not as exact as we always hoped it would be. I hope there's more improvement, and I hope that this idea of putting the question on the people's sense of the, yeah, that they're putting the question about which country you came from is going to add a great deal to the loss of exactness of the census. There's just more and more people are not going to answer what their citizenship is. That is a concern for the commissioners. We take the numbers that were given, though, but there is one interesting little twist. Again, it's a California twist. In the last line drawing, people in prisons were counted where the prison was, but the legislature has changed that now. They will be counted that their original address before they went to prison. That's going to have a negative impact on rural counties because they may have had, up in Susanville, may have had 5,000 prisoners, and they're gone, and so that's going to affect the rural communities. One of the topics that we're considering for a future session like this is digging into the census and doing some outreach. You brought possibly using our saving California community's format to get the word out on that, so stay tuned if that's of interest. I haven't seen some head nods, so maybe that's another topic for us. Yes. I'll just add that it's a very serious concern, and on the positive side, the state is investing tens of millions of dollars in the budget to try and supplement reaching out to what's called hard to count populations, which are populations that are hard to count, but particularly where a citizenship question might lead to depressing the actual census count, so it's not a perfect solution, but at least on the positive side, the state is trying to have a very deliberate effort to try and minimize any impacts in that regard. If you have signed in, if you haven't yet signed in and given us your email address, please consider doing that. I'm gonna ask if the presenters would be willing to let us share your slides, those who did, with the folks who are here and with the other folks who are on our email list already, if that'd be all right, so they're nodding their heads yes. I think we're kinda at our time. I was just gonna make one other comment about the census thing, which is that PPIC has done some work on census. I've been part of that too, about the census count and the accuracy and so forth, and we have some interactive features on our website about sort of where the hard to count communities are and we have a report that looks at the potential impact of an undercount, partly because of a possibility of a citizenship question, so if you're interested in that topic, please go to our website and take a look at those resources. Thank you, Eric. You just made a comment. I'd like to offer each of you on the panel a one minute final closing if you'd like to have anything further to say. I have to actually, come on guys, I can't. A microphone. Microphone. This whole process cost each of you something less than three cents a year, so you cost you 25 cents to have your vote matter, and I think that's a pretty good buy, pretty good buy. And I'll just say, go to ShaveCaliforniasFuture.auditor.ca.gov and sign up now and the application period starts June 10. I have nothing to add other than please consider applying and if you know someone great, encourage them to apply. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, and I thank you, Susan Lovenberg for putting all of these pieces together for us and thanks to all of you for being here tonight. Thanks to Davis Media Access for recording this for the broader community and that's a wrap.