 Hello. My name is Professor Vanille Urando. I'm a professor emeritus at the University of Dayton School of Law. I have been involved in racial justice issues for almost 50 years and I taught race and racism in American law for almost 30 years. I have also taught American healthcare law, torts, criminal law, remedies, and professional responsibility. So I have a broad range of experience. That said, my expertise in this area is more about how the system works than the specific details. So what I want to do today is just present an overview and some issues for racial justice that we should be concerned about. So what is political gerrymanting and what does racial justice have to do with it? That's what we're going to talk about. And I don't believe in presenting something without some potential solutions. We'll talk about that a little bit and we'll talk about the most recent case a little bit. So what do you think is the best path to political victory? Is it running good candidates? Is it crafting a strong campaign message? Is it having a good economy? Clearly all of those matter, but what can matter most in our society is how the district maps are drawn. And so politicians, especially in a party politics scenario, will draw district maps to help themselves either by packing the votes or splitting the votes. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. The gerrymandering is problematic because at a minimum makes voters feel like their votes don't count, that it's not voters who let politicians, it's politicians who decide who their voters will be. And that's a significantly different system. So what I'm going to do is go through this Jarrah political gerrymandering talk about it and I'm going to share my slides right now so that we can get so right now what you should be seeing is this my screen showing the political gerrymandering you. Hi. I'm glad you all got up early to do this. Can you see the screen okay? Yes, I can. Okay, so I'm going to proceed on with the presentation and hopefully my phone will be okay. So start with what is gerrymandering? I put up this map in Tennessee because it really is a good map to show how politicians draw the districts in a given state. This is particularly Tennessee. In the United States, every state elects a certain number of people to the house of, excuse me, every state elects a certain number of people to the house of representatives. And that number is based on the census count, which is why there's this big argument over the citizenship questions. And I'll do a presentation on that. But essentially an accurate census account is important to drawing the districts. So because of the count, for instance, North Carolina can have Tennessee can have 13 districts drawn. But gerrymandering can affect anybody where there's districts. So like if you have districts in your city, your city can, the politicians can draw, the politicians can draw districts that affect their, obviously the US Senate, the Senate isn't affected because the Senate has two votes per state, no matter how many people are in the state. But the house has, the house is divided up by the number of people. And so the way we do it now is we have, supposedly, have districts of equal number of people. So that every vote counts. One, that's why the districts have to be of similar size. The fact is, is gerrymandering that is drawing a map to meet some objective other than one vote. Other than competition has been around from the very beginning. The founders discussed the problem. And it existed back then. And it has just gotten worse over years. And both parties tend to redistrict when they're in power to favor themselves. So this is not a Republican or a Democrat issue. The fact is, is the Republicans by winning so much seats in the election got to redraw districts in many states because they had taken over the state legislature. But Democrats do it in their states. And so it's important to know that while this may present a unique, the problems that the Republicans are presenting now may be seeing kind of uniquely Republican, it really isn't. So a partisan gerrymandering political is when the map is drawn intentionally to benefit a particular party. You'll notice when you look at this map that it's not a clean map. And that's no accident. And the map was drawn by North Carolina Republicans. And the result is that, and it was effective. The result is that even though the Democrats won the same amount of votes, it was almost 50-50, the Republicans ended up with a 10 to three majority in the state House instead of 50-50. We'll talk more about racial gerrymandering and how it can mean the dilution of votes of certain groups. So this is just to re-emphasize how it works. If you look at number 12 on the map, which is that long purple district over to the left, and number four, which is also a long district, you see the lengths that the Republicans went to to draw a district that would work for them. So there's basically four ways you, well, it's probably more than four, but we categorize them into four when you do partisan. You can have, so we start with the premise that districts have to be drawn. So you don't get to say, at least not at this stage, you don't get to say, okay, we're going to have 13 representatives and everybody in the state gets 13 votes and they can vote for anybody they want. Everybody runs statewide and we go from there. No, we don't do that. We could do that, but we don't. So you could draw the districts to be competitive. That is, you could draw them, let's say, red and blue represents almost the same number of votes in the state 50-50, but they're distributed in a way where it's, if you just draw straight lines, it's just going to be competitive. You're going to have five, you're going to have, you know, five blue votes to five red votes. There's no advantage. You can draw what is called sweetheart districts, which are districts drawn to protect an incumbent. So they're not so much concerned about taking up drawing to get more or less districts. They're concerned about making sure that a particular incumbent stays in power. You can have what is called packing, where you put all of one kind of voter as much as you can in one district so that disperse their power over the other. So if you start off with four districts and you put all the red, as many of the red voters as you can into one district, it means that the other four districts are going to be dominated by blue voters. And even while in theory, the red, there are as many red voters in the state as blue voters because they're distributed in this way, they don't have, they end up with only one district, which is one representative compared to the other four of the blue. Cracking is when you take the voters of a certain group and spread them out in a way that groups them but in different districts, so that you put the red voters in groups as much as possible, but not all in one district. You split the vote, you crack them. And cracking the votes can often give an advantage that another method won't. Now in the past they had to do this all by just hand and thinking about it, but now they can run computer models which will end up telling you how to draw the most aligned vote so that it gets, comes out giving the results they want. So that's what the case Ruko versus Common Cause was about. If you look at that lone green map district in the left-hand corner in North Carolina, this district was sued over particularly because it was drawn just for the purpose of giving political advantage. And the recent decision, the June 27th 2019 decision, a five to four majority opinion, said, yeah, this looks like unpermissible partisan gerrymandering. It's despicable, it's unjust, it's outrageous, but the majority said it's a political question. Now this idea of things being a political question is the idea that the courts shouldn't put themselves into the middle of what something that the state legislatures or the Congress or the voters should do. If those people don't do it, then the court shouldn't do it. And that was a reason for a long time that the courts refused to do anything about segregation. They said state rights meant it was a political decision and while we may think segregation is awful and horrible and everything, we're not going to tell states what to do. Congress said, I mean not Congress, the Roberts Court, the majority basically said, hey, we don't have the ability to do anything about this. This is something that is horrible and awful and should be corrected, but we are not the ones that should correct. I think it's important to look at Kagan's dissent, I'm sorry, dissent because I think that it provides a view of political counters what the majority said. They said the only way to understand the majority's opinion is to say, well, in the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and fragment infringements on individual rights, in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this nation value and law no one defends, the majority declines to provide any remedy. Kagan says for the first time, I'm not sure that's true, in this nation's history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation. So the majority said, yeah, this violates the Constitution because it disrupts the one vote, one person view of the Constitution as embedded in the articles, but we can't do anything about it because we don't know of a workable legal standard. So in order for law to work, there has to be a standard that people can apply. Now the problem, the reality is, and this is what Kagan points out, is that that's what courts are supposed to do. Courts set standards all the time and then over time they define what those standards mean. And Kagan pointed out that in fact the lower courts had in fact proposed a workable standard. That workable standard, we like to in the law boil things down to elements that have to be proven or disproven and then we define the element. So the proposed standard for to judge whether partisan gerrymandering is impermissible would include intent, effect, and causation. Three things that are common to the law now. So to a large extent, if they can look at other areas of the law to articulate what those standards mean. But Kagan when Fothern says, so when we talk about intent, we're saying was the state officials predominant purpose, not only purpose, predominant purpose in drawing the lines the way they drew them to entrench their power, party and power. Then you have to ask, did the lines drawn in fact have that unintended fact? So you can't sue over, their purpose was to get power but in fact that didn't happen. So you have to have the effect that in fact it gave them more power. And then they she said, there needs to be causation element. That is you have there the state gets to say, wait a minute, yeah, we drew the lines this way. And yeah, the lines predominant purpose predominant purpose might have been to entrench the party power. And it had that effect. But we have a legitimate nonpartisan justification for drawing the math. Okay, now you may think, well that does away with the intent. Well, sort of, if they can prove it, but the what we have found in the past is, you can't have pretext. So when you come up with a purpose that is really obviously just pretext, that is not legitimate. And generally speaking, purposes that are articulated after the fact are considered pretext. So that was that decision. And right now, partisan gerrymandering is legal in the United States until states do something. Okay, so how does that interact with racial gerrymandering? So the 15th Amendment sections one and two says that protects the right of vote and that nothing should that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or bridge. And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to protect that largely because the 15th Amendment was states were denying the right to vote based on race. And they were diluting the vote. And so racial gerrymandering is still an illegally impermissible reason thing that can be done. The legal standard in terms of whether or not it it is something that the courtifying impermissible is compacting it. So they look at, have you put all the minorities into one group or are combating them? Or they look at irregularity. That is whether or not the district is so odd that racial, it has to have a racial motivation behind it. Now the problem with trying to do something about racial gerrymandering is that even though it's still illegal in 2013, the Supreme Court made Section 5, which was the monitoring section of the Voting Rights Act, basically did away with that by saying that those states that there would not be automatically monitoring people based on, I mean states based on Section 5. So now there's, while it's illegal, there's no real monitoring. And the only thing that can be done is to sue. So what is the consequences of, one of the things that happened was when you put minorities into compact districts in order to give them more power. So let's say you have five districts that you, in which you put one to divide up into five districts. The consequence of majority and majority districts is you might in fact be deluding the influence. So while you pack, what they would do is pack a lot of minorities into one district on the idea that at least they get to let a representative that represents their views in those districts. But the problem becomes is if you look to the 50% minority districts, what you see is that out of the five districts, they only have influence or power in two of the districts. And that's the problem. Now a 30% more minority packing will give them more influence because they will be to the left. You will have two districts where they can elect someone, only one district where they can't elect anyone. And they will have two districts where they have some influence. So packing may have the significant packing has the unintended consequence of diluting the vote of minorities. Here's the problem. Partisan gerrymandering in today inflicts racial harm. So partisan gerrymandering privileges political insiders. If this in France is voter outsider, so I'm not a Democrat or Republican. I'm a socialist. Partisan gerrymandering means I can never have my views represented because I can never get enough votes to win a representative. But the biggest problem for racial minorities is that political parties are organized along racial lines. And so when you say partisan gerrymandering is permissible, which it is now because the Supreme Court did not find it unconstitutional, then they will say, hey, we drew lines to give ourselves political power. We put all the Republicans together. We didn't draw lines to give ourselves racial power. We put all the whites together. But the problem is those two are now linked for the most part. And I think that the courts are going to say, when you go to racial germ and during the courts are going to say they have, you know, this alternative view, yeah, the political is okay, racial is no, we can see that they just drew for Republicans. And if that happened to be all whites then hey, that is the way the cookie crumbles. The other problem with racial gerrymandering is that could be used is that in and of itself it is a badge of slavery. Not being able to vote was linked to slavery and and it subjugates a protected class. I'm having no hope that it'll be done in this court. But I think eventually a court will have to flip the script. That is say, yeah, you can do partisan gerrymandering. But if it has a race effect that takes priority and you don't get to draw districts that have a racially disenfranchised, even if the read a predominant purpose of your drawing the maps was a partisan, because racial gerrymandering is a badge of slavery. And so and that is the courts have always have always said that getting rid of the badges of slavery is one of the things that is high priority for the courts to do. And I've already talked about this. Now, both Democrats and Republicans use gerrymandering to give themselves some racial advantage. Republicans tend to pack racial minority voters in order to concentrate racial minorities in one district. While Democrats tend to crack racial minority votes to spread them out over multiple districts so that because they know that minority black voters are are a are a consistent voting block and that if they spread them over several districts that they'll be more likely to take those those districts back because they get a voting block and those two about it. Well, one thing people talk about the problem right now is that the reforms are drawn, but mostly by politicians in power, the districts. And so of course, the incentive is to draw to protect yourself. One of the problem one of the recommendations is to have a bipartisan commission draw it. The problem with that is that that commission is still going to be influenced by a duopoly giving power to both Democrats and Republicans, but excluding other parties. Maybe a better alternative and this is multi member districts. So instead of having one person for one district, you have 13 persons for the state of North Carolina and voters get to vote on 13 people. You get and if you have proportional representation, it means that for instance, if the social Democrats can get 20% of the vote, they'll get one representative in Congress. Proportional representation means that it's no longer a winner takes all it's you get the number you get to get the number of representatives based on the number of votes that that were cast. And if you have ranking votes, that's it's not necessary, but ranking votes also allows people to go with their first second and third choices, which means that people are more likely to vote their true feelings on the first vote. And that person can get voted in because people have voted for them, then thinking, oh, well, yes, I'm a socialist Democrat, a Democratic socialist, but they're never going to get elected. So I guess I'm will vote for a Democrat or Republican. No, I'll vote for socialist Democrat, because on my first vote and rank the Democrats second. So if my socialist Democrat doesn't get 20% of the vote, then my vote would then go to my second vote. So that's the other I didn't put it on the slide, but ranking is another reform that could be done. I this is intended just to please overview to the extent that you want to know a lot more. And I have to tell you you should want to know a lot more, a lot more than what I can tell you here. I've put it links in the jury mandoring links to good things on the on the internet. My website now has a jury mandoring page, which all of those the two cases and those articles on race and gender mandoring will come up. So you can just go to that page and that for comments and discussion. I think you can unmute yourself and you can just ask a question. The video will be put up on YouTube. The slides are going to be available on page. That's a random window. This is yes. So we know that, you know, Ohio has a problem too, also with how we have gerrymandered our district. You know, like our congressional district where Martha has now been cut into the accurate area. And I know that a few years ago, the way they gerrymandered the district is they gerrymandered it enough in order for genus percentage to lose the seat. Yeah. And they also talked about this whole bipartisan commission that I really had to change anything because even with the bipartisan commission, it has to go to a larger body for. So, so what are your thoughts on that? Because we're still going to a Republican controlled house. And they're never going to vote for anything that is just 50-50. But that's the problem with the bipartisan commission. And the other problem with the bipartisan commission and just dividing it up Republican and Democrats, is it disenfranchised people who don't want to be Republicans or Democrats? And then in a system where you're supposed to have one vote, my vote shouldn't be disenfranchised because I don't want to revoke Republican or Democrat. A better way is a multi-district. And it doesn't have to be whole state. They can draw districts that if it is the research and you'd have to look at the research, the research tends to show as long as the districts have at least five members in it, that gerrymandering effect won't work because it'll be proportional. The good thing about Ohio is you all can get changed by putting stuff on the ballot and you can make constitutional changes by ballot. And so you're not dependent upon the state doing the right thing. Unfortunately, many states, you don't have the power to put things on the ballot. And so whoever's in power, whether it's Democrat or Republican, is going to protect that power. In the legislator, he started that they wanted to also do some legislation. Well, that's a particular issue. Well, supposedly, we have this problem in Florida. And this is why it's important to think carefully about how people who don't want to do it will make changes in a constitutional amendment. Florida has the ability to do a constitutional amendment. So in theory, if you pass something that is in the Constitution, the legislature can't come behind and not do it or do it differently than the Constitution provides. That would the Supreme Court of the United States doesn't generally get involved in state lower state actions, but ignoring your own Constitution is one of the things they'll get involved in. So in theory, if you make a ballot that gets elected and is in the Constitution, then whoever the legislatures are, have to abide by it. Now, that said, I can tell you what Florida was one of the states that had felony disenfranchisement. Lots of people who couldn't vote because of felony disenfranchisement and a really onerous method of getting your vote back. And so the people in Florida went and passed a constitutional amendment, which said that basically once a person finished their requirements under the law, so whatever sentence they have, once they finish that sentence, they would get their vote back. The legislature who didn't, don't want to give the vote back came and passed a law that said part of the sentence for every person is paying back their fines and paying restitution. So until you pay off your fines and pay off your restitution, you haven't completed your sentence, which essentially then continues to disenfranchise a large group of people. So if you're wanting to do a constitutional amendment, you have to really have some good thinkers think about how will the people in the legislature interpret this to their advantage to pass laws around it? And then one thing you could do is that you could put in a constitutional amendment that the legislature can't pass any law that modifies the enactment without putting it up for vote. So it's kind of voting a vote by the citizens. But yeah, that's the problem, our comments. Greetings, Mama. This is Ernest Steve Muhammad out of Dayton. Oh, Steve, I'm so glad that I haven't talked to you forever. It's been a while here. I'll remove this thing. I guess, you know, this subject, this topic, gerrymandering is so, it's so in depth and confusing really. It's just, it's hard to even know where to begin. What do you think about the, it being so confusing to the average, to the average citizen? Do you think that that right there alone is a serious problem? Sure, you're absolutely right about that. And in fact, what has happened in our life has gotten so confusing that now what people just rely on some community sources, I mean, general sources for information, and that sources often politically motivated and inaccurate are manipulated. Yes, I think a lack of knowledge and lack of understanding. But the problem is it empowers people who want to be in power. Yeah, I mean, so there's a large part of the citizenry. What is Democrat? If you're in a Democratic state, Democratic voters want it. Right. Nobody, you know, the only, you know, Democratic voters, what they want is not to be disenfranchised in a Republican state. What Republicans want is not to be disenfranchised in a Democratic state. But if they control the state, they want to maintain control. And the problem is both getting voters to understand why that is problematic for us as Black people. Because even when you say, well, the Democrats cracked our votes, but they don't crack the votes in our interests. They cracked the votes in their interests. And that we may have, we may decide we want districts run somewhat different if it was up to us. You know, so yeah, it is and it's a complicated and there's so much going on. I mean, obviously the delusion of the voting rights is a big issue. So gerrymandering can seem, is not seen, is very technical and and it's hard for people to understand. And on some level, everybody wants it. They just don't want to be the people who are disadvantaged by it. Right, right. Now, do you think that the gerrymandering is on a national level, you have the vote tampering or rigging from what they would say foreign interest. But locally, it looks as though this gerrymandering is just as as harmful to the voting process as vote rigging. I think it's probably, it is more. Yeah, it's more because the whole, you know, trolling and bots and all of that is not a certain way of getting votes. Drawing district lines is. Right. Yeah, you know, it's kind of like, if I could only do one thing, it would not be deal with the box or the trolling. It would be deal with the gerrymandering and how that impacts us. Right. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Nice to see you. You too. I wish I was still in Dayton and well, not really, because I liked warm weather, but I do miss you all. Yeah, we miss you too, for sure. But I'm glad that you put on these webcasts, because this is really important. I am going to try to do them fairly frequently, and if there's anything people want me to do it on, they should let me know. Because I'm happy to put together something like this where we talk 15, 20 minutes and then where I give a little lecture, background information, and then we talk about it. All right. I'll check out that page too and read and get some more information. And we can do a follow-up one. Right. Okay. The other thing to look at is the local district we tend to forget that, but we should be looking at how the district, if your city has district, you should be looking at it. All right. Now, how often can you change or can you, you know, as far as gerrymandering, how often can those lines be changed? Well, they're changed. They have to be done in conjunction with the census, and the census is done at the national every 10 years. Okay. The lines are changed about every 10 years, unless you can go to court and win a case to say that what was done is inappropriate and irregular. Good morning, Professor Randall. Good morning. Yes, who is this? This is Joelle Jones from Dayton, Ohio. Okay. I'm looking at the top of your head. Oh, can you see me? I didn't want nobody to see me. My hair is not done. Just kidding. All we're looking at is the top of your head. Okay. Question for you just for clarification. The court, the case that went to the Supreme Court relative to gerrymandering. Yes. Was it argued under a violation of civil rights? No. It wasn't. So let me ask you this. Is that a possibility? Go ahead. I'm sorry. Is there a possibility that that case can be reintroduced to the lower courts to go eventually to the Supreme Court as a violation of civil rights and equal protection under the law for minorities? Is that another way to view that or is that not possible? No, that's exactly possible, especially if they go, well, not this particular case, but another case because the rule basically is that unless the once the case has been litigated, it's litigated. Okay. The court can kick it back down and say, okay, we want you to do X. And then when they do X, it comes back up through the court again. But that's not what happened in this case in the common cause. What happened in this case is they just said, hey, there's nothing we can do about it. But they can bring another case. I mean, it probably wasn't argued on racial lines because there wasn't enough of a problem for them to be able to point it out. But if they can, yeah, they can bring a different case and use equal protection and the 15th Amendment and the voting rights act. So that could look very differently in Ohio, whereby it could be argued along racial lines. If you're bringing a totally different case, you can bring a totally different case now. Okay. Okay. I thought you were talking about bringing this same case back up. Yes, ma'am. I was, but just asking. Okay, no, that's fine. I was just really disappointed, but not surprised by the court's decision. And just wondering, where do we go from this point, you know? Over to us. Go ahead. To predict, is racial implication, Yusuf, based on racial implication, but it's clear that the courts have said this is a state and Congress problem, state and Congress has to solve it. So that means that people in Ohio who have a districting that's partisan, but not necessarily racial, will need to do something on a political level to address it. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for holding this webcast. I look forward to the links and I'm sure I'll get in touch with you regarding more questions going forward. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Dr. Randall, would you like to? Yes. Do we also need to make sure, I think, what other things you talked about earlier, you talked about earlier was, you know, the public doesn't quite understand, but I think for me, because I work with the African Americans in these, I think a lot of things really don't understand how gerrymandering not only impacts their representation, but it impacts their education, employment, housing, and all those budgets, and how dollars are dispersed into that community. I think that they don't understand the whole overarching like, one wrong move over here impacts all of this stuff over there. So, yeah, just a match. So you're in a state that where Republicans get 50% of the vote, but they get 10 of the 13 seats. It means that you now have Republican policies, even though the state itself is only 50% Republican. Okay. And so you're going to have Republican policies in housing, Republican policies in education, everything that comes up to a vote in your state Congress is going to be Republican when, in fact, it should be more iffy, 50-50. That is sometimes because you, if it was 50-50 vote, then sometimes it would be Republican and sometimes it would be Democrat, because neither one of them has enough vote to control the House, to control the legislature. When you have gerrymandering, you get, you redesign the whole state to ignore voters' rights and turn it over to a particular party, and that at a minimum is going to last for 10 years. At a minimum, possibly more. Wow. Especially in this day and age, where they have sophisticated ways of doing. So, the problem coming up is in 2010, how we got into this situation, in 2010, Republicans took over a lot of state houses, and 2010 is when they re-drew the districts. Now, the re-districts are going to be drawn after the census 2020, and for places where Republicans are still in control, unless you do something, they're still going to draw districts that maintain their power. And this is the problem, the problem that Payne was pointing out is you say this is a political decision, but voters really don't have a way of fixing this. And so, we should, we should step in at least, if this is a constitutional violation, which it is, then we should have stepped in. We don't want to be judging every re-districting. She agreed with that. But we should step in on the, there should, we should put forth a standard and step in, step in in the most egregious re-districting areas. And if they had done that, I think that what would have happened for the 2020 district is they would, they would still be trying to maintain power, but they would not go too far for fear that they would get the Supreme Court involved. Supreme Court has basically said, we're not getting involved. They didn't say you did the wrong thing and this is illegal, but we can't judge your facts. They could have said that. They didn't say we believe this is legal, but not in this particular instance. They didn't say that. They said, yeah, yeah, this is unconstitutional, but there's nothing we can do about it. So Professor Randall, then what becomes the recourse then is that, so then if the Supreme Court can't do anything about it, they say they have no jurisdiction over this particular issue and it belongs to the state, then does that mean that pockets of grassroots organizations have to educate, expose, and I mean, how do we get? I think you have to, I think you have to do for this issue what people did for the marijuana issue. Oh, so make it a ballot issue? Yeah, I think you have to make it a ballot issue because you're never going to get people to give up power. They don't have to. So we have something regarding, I have to, I'm not sure exactly what it was, that Ohio was doing here regarding redistricting. I have to look at exactly what the law was, but nothing came up. I'm not sure of any of the other viewers know, but I want to do some more research on that. Would it be possible to contact you later and maybe as neighborhood politics, which organization I represent, as able to get you here to do a form on this particular issue? I'd be happy to come and do it, but I am not the most expert on it. A few of the people that articles at this are all people, African American, people of color who are, who have a deep understanding of this issue in race. Okay. Now, I feel confident enough to provide some basic education like I'm doing now. Okay. And I'll be happy to do a webinar. I'm my 70s now, my mid 70s, and I don't like to travel much. So yeah, but I'll be happy to do something as basic as what I've done now. But I know some of the people that articles I list, and if you all want to do something, I would be happy to put you in touch with someone who is much more knowledgeable than I am. I think here's my solution. I don't, I don't think districts are, I don't think a commission is the solution. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. I went out. I didn't mean, by ballot, you should move to multi-member districts with proportional representation. Is that a constitutional, is that a constitutional amendment to state law to the Ohio Constitution? Is that what happens then? That's what you're going to have to do. It don't matter what you decide to do, you're going to have to do it as an amendment to the Constitution. Because if you don't do it as amended to the Constitution, you will always be battling up against whoever's in power. They don't want to do it, and so they don't do it. They come up with reasons, no, no, no, no, no. Are they, they select stuff that they know is going to be ineffective, like a bipartisan, bipartisan commission. The problem I have is that, and I said this earlier, I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican, a bipartisan commission just maintains that duopoly. And people like myself, who don't vote Democrat and Republican, our votes are still disenfranchised. But if you had a multi-member district with proportional representation, then it's possible that someone like me and others like me could get at least one representative out of five who was a Democratic Socialist. That's what, and that's why I need that the Democrats or Republicans are going to want it, because it actually empowers third parties. It's definitely not what they want, especially here in the state of Ohio. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. So we've been almost an hour. Yeah, exactly, an hour almost. I'm going to stop here. I'm going to set this up to be put up on the internet. Like I said, photography is there. The slides will be up on, the video will be on YouTube and available to anyone. If you want my slides, they, a PDF file will be up on Patreon. Okay. If you want to get a copy of my slides, if you have something that you would like me to do, if you have a topic that you'd like to see me covered, email me. And my email is on the slide and I'll be happy to do so. And thank you all so much for turning out and having this good discussion. I'm glad that it hit hit a need.