 I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It is my great honor and pleasure to be with you this afternoon and to welcome you to the Ford School for this really fantastic conversation. Today's policy talks at the Ford School event is hosted by the Center for Local State and Urban Policy, known as Close-Up. Welcome as well to our online viewers and our thanks to Detroit Public Television WTVS for their partnership in making today's event available to voters throughout the state of Michigan. Our state faces a big day in just under a month. Among the important issues Michigan voters will decide on November 6th are two key ballot initiatives. One proposal addresses who essentially draws and how our congressional districts are drawn, and another one would amend the state constitution around voting eligibility and other requirements. To help us better understand the pros and the cons of these proposals, Ford School Emeritus Professor John Chamberlain has assembled today's expert panel, like you just to start by helping me thank John for making this happen. Local bios for our speakers are in your printed program and John is going to say a bit more about each one of them in just a moment. So please just join me for now in welcoming Nancy Wang, Sharon Dolente, Richard McClellan and Christopher Thomas. We're going to follow our usual Ford School format after John and the panelists do their work together. We're going to open it up to the audience. The way you ask questions is by writing your questions on a note card. There'll be a staff member coming around to pick them up. They'll bring them to the front and we have a wonderful student team who's going to sort through them and make sure that they get asked here to this terrific panel. Close-up program manager Tom Avoco is going to help the Ford School students do that. If you are watching or listening online, you can also send your questions in via Twitter with a hashtag policy talks. With that, let me turn things over to John and ask him to come up to the podium and really look forward to the event we're going to have today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dean Barr and welcome to our audience here in Annenberg Auditorium and to those of you watching the live streams of today's event either on Detroit Public TV or on the Ford School website. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge and thank supporters and sponsors of today's policy talk at the Ford School, the Center for Local, State and Urban Policy in the Ford School, the Department of Political Science in the College of LSNA, the U of M Alumni Association, the U of M student group We Listen, and the Ford School student group, the Domestic Policy Corps, and the League of Women Voters of the Ann Arbor Area. Today's panel is entitled Electoral Reform via Ballad Initiatives. As most of you already know, citizens of Michigan can place before voters proposed amendments to the Michigan Constitution. To do so, they must gather at least 350,000 valid signatures on petitions. They were discussing two such proposals that will appear on the November 6th ballot. Proposal two will, if approved by voters, amend the Constitution to provide for an independent redistricting commission that will be responsible for drawing new congressional and state legislative districts following each decennial census. Proposal three will, if approved by voters, amend the Constitution to make voter registration and voting easier for citizens, including automatic and election day registration, no reason absentee ballots, and the option of straight ticket voting. Your program contains the ballot wording for each of these proposals. In addition, there are several handouts that provide additional information that was available as you came in. And now the requisite request that you check your cell phones and turn them off so that we can proceed uninterrupted by phone calls. I'd now like to introduce our panelists. To my direct left is Richard McClellan, a graduate of Michigan State and Michigan Law School, whose practiced law in Michigan for nearly 50 years, or maybe 50 years in a little bit. Fifty years. He's served in advisory capacities to Michigan governors Milliken, Engler, and Snyder. Several practices included extensive representation of political candidates, political action committees, ballot question campaigns, super PACs, and 401C4 organizations. He's going to share his reasons for believing that proposal two is not good for Michigan and also offer some comments about proposal three. Next to him is Nancy Wang, the board chair for voters not politicians, the group that spearheaded the drive to place proposal two on the ballot. Nancy graduated from the College of Engineering at U of M and the Michigan Law School, practice environmental law, and she's going to argue in favor of proposal two. Next to her is Sharon Delente, the voting rights strategist for the ACLU of Michigan, one of the lead partners in the promote the vote drive that was backed by more than a dozen organizations and that led to proposal three being on the ballot. Sharon is a graduate of the Ford School and the Michigan Law School and will argue in favor of proposal three. And on the far end, Christopher Thomas is the former elections director of the state of Michigan, a post he held for 36 years. He graduated from MSU and the Thomas Cooley School of Law. He was twice elected president of the National Association of State Election Directors and in 2012 received that association's distinguished service award. In 2013, he was appointed by President Barack Obama to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Chris will offer comments on both of these proposals that we're talking about today. Now that you know a bit more about today's panelists, let's begin with Nancy Wang. Thank you so much. Before we begin, I'd like to just take a quick survey to see how many people in the audience know, have heard about voters not politicians before today. I see a lot of familiar faces. Okay, great. I just like to thank the Ford School and close up for this opportunity. Our research shows that our biggest challenge now, 29 days before election day, is not the policy, but rather just people knowing about it. So I really, really welcome and appreciate this opportunity to talk about proposal two. As John mentioned, I am the Board Chair of Voters Not Politicians. We are a group of ordinary citizens who got together and responded to a Facebook post that our founder, Katie Fahey, put up in November of 2016. So I've been volunteering. I and 4,000 other Michiganders have been volunteering for Voters Not Politicians now. And I'm still a volunteer. What we wanted to do was we wanted to get together. We knew that gerrymandering was a huge problem in Michigan. It's one of the worst gerrymandered states in the country. And we wanted to find a nonpartisan solution that would work for voters, not politicians. Hence our name. And you might have heard a little bit about our activities when we were out collecting petition signatures. We were able to collect 428,000 signatures in just over 100 days from all 83 counties. And it was all done by volunteers, which is incredible, but also it was out of necessity because we were completely grassroots and self-funded. And so, but it worked out really well. And now we have a proposal on the ballot. So the problem, I'll start with the problem. Like I said, Michigan is one of the top three most gerrymandered states in the country. And it's not a group that we want to, you know, be a part of. You guys might have heard of Gil v. Whitford, which went up to the US Supreme Court this past term. That is a case that challenged Wisconsin's district maps on the basis of partisan bias. Michigan's maps are actually more biased than Wisconsin's. And the process of how it works here in Michigan is that our legislators, the state legislature, gets to draw its own maps for its own election districts. So, you know, the state reps and state senators, they get to draw the maps for their own districts as well as the congressional districts. Obviously, that's a huge conflict of interest. If they draw the maps one way, they can basically guarantee that the district will be a safe Republican or a safe Democratic district. And the reason they can do that is because of the vast amount of data that's available today. You know, not just your voting history, but your income and even, you know, Facebook and all of that is available, as well as really sophisticated computer programs and really fast computers that can draw, you know, tens of thousands of maps in the space of a minute. And so what the legislature has been doing and you don't have to take my word for it, I'm really appreciative of the media actually and the state's been covering gerrymandering Michigan really, really well. And so, for example, Bridge Magazine has put out a bunch of articles that have really gone in depth in what, you know, examining what the problem is. And I've asked the Ford School to attach one of their articles as part of this packet that's available to you. And, you know, there's, what the evidence shows, there's emails, there's witness testimony now because the League of Women Voters is a plaintiff in a case and they're challenging Michigan's maps just like that Wisconsin case. And they've uncovered all of these emails that show exactly, you know, why Michigan's maps are so skewed. And it's because the Republican Party, which happens to be in power right now and they control the map drawing process in 2011, they gave a million dollars to a group that has no staff, has no offices, just a PO box. That group paid consultants to sit in a dark, you know, in a, I don't know about dark, but to sit in secret and draw maps that favor the Republican Party as much as possible. And there's emails that say, okay, you know, this is great. We have a strong nine to five result that'll endure from 2012 and beyond. Nine to five is the number of Republican congressional representatives. So we in Michigan have 14 congressional representatives that we send to DC, nine of them are Republican and five of them are Democrat. And this is despite the fact that in 2012, 2014 and 2016, in the federal races, the Republicans candidates actually won less than 50% of the vote from Michigan voters. So why this matters? It matters because the politicians are picking their voters, not the other way around. These maps are so, they're drawn so well, I guess you could say, that it enshrines a, you know, it embeds a party advantage, again, despite election outcomes. So there's nothing that, you know, there's nothing the voters can do. So that's something in an argument that we hear a lot. Well, you know, to the victors go the spoils. And if people really cared, then they would just vote these politicians out. And that is exactly the problem because these maps are so gerrymandered, we can't vote the politicians out. You know, you're hearing things about a blue wave coming maybe in 2018, it would take a tsunami. So, you know, one in a million year maybe event for a large, large portion of the electorate to shift parties for these politicians to be unseated. So what we see in elections is we see, you know, a lot of races go uncontested, right? Or maybe, you know, the primaries, that's the race that matters. We have politicians who are unaccountable to us. No seats change hands between the parties. And again, all of this is very well documented. So voters are politicians, a proposal too. We seek to take the power of redistricting out of the politicians' hands and put it into the voters' hands. This is not a new idea, even in Michigan. So right now in our 1963 constitution, there is a independent redistricting commission that's written and it actually operated for three redistricting cycles. Unfortunately, it was ruled unconstitutional because this is kind of getting a little bit into the weeds, but it was allowed to draw districts that had different numbers of people in it and the federal constitution requires that you have districts that have equal population. So that's the reason that that commission no longer operates. It's been ruled unconstitutional. So what we would do actually is we would take away those constitutional infirmities. We would reestablish an independent redistricting citizens' commission in Michigan to draw the district lines. So what we are, the proposal, and I encourage everyone to please, if you have any questions, there are a lot of volunteers actually from a lot of voters not politicians right in the audience and they would be happy to answer them, me as well. But the proposal, what it does is it takes the fundamental problem with politicians drawing their own lines out. So politicians, you can put safeguards in there but it's the fox guarding the hen house. It's too much at stake, their own livelihoods at stake, their own careers and their parties that hinge on whether they make the decision to draw this district around this community or if they break that into four different parts so that they can get four really safe districts. And so what this proposal does is it takes the politicians out of the redistricting business. Again, framers of our 1963 constitution recognize that this is the better way to go. That commission was also a citizens' commission. Six other states have citizens' commissions operating already. And what the research shows is that, unsurprisingly, commissioned drawn districts are more fair, they're more impartial. And a hallmark of our proposal is that everything would be transparent. So everything the commission does from the selection process, how they're selected, the names in the hat, who got removed, all of that would be made public. All the deliberations of the commission would be public. They could only meet, they would only be able to do business in open meetings. The maps that they seek to adopt, they'd have to go around the state and have at least 10 public hearings to show the public what they're considering and to get input from the public. And they have to accept, also, maps that are drawn by the public. And they would get public testimony about, okay, do these communities, do these districts actually make sense or not? Are these actual communities in the real world as opposed to politically expedient ones? Like I said, these commissions are already operating in other states. And they've been shown to be more fair, that means one party doesn't get an advantage just because they got to draw the maps. The number of seats that a party gets more accurately kind of drives with the number of votes they got. It just makes common sense. The races are more competitive. So they're actually new candidates that get into the races. There are fewer uncontested races. And they're more responsive. So seats actually do change hands with a change in the vote, in voter sentiment. And that's exactly what we are seeking to have again here in Michigan. And so I wanna take, I have like one minute, unfortunately, but I wanted to kind of maybe address some of the more common arguments that we hear against the proposal. Number one, that it's a bunch of amateurs, and this is like a really technical process. In fact, the legislators right now, like I said, the evidence just shows that they outsourced, and there's a one quote in a bridge article, it says, well, we outsourced everything and they outsourced redistricting as well to experts and consultants. And that would be the same process that this commission would have available to it. So we guaranteed them a budget and they could hire their experts to advise them. And the big difference, of course, like I said before, is that it would all be transparent. You would know who they hired and what maps they were considering and why they rejected ones and then adopted other ones. Thank you. I could talk all day and I'm happy to. But unfortunately, we have time limits. Thank you, Nancy. We now turn to Sharon Delente, who will talk about proposal three. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for welcoming me back to the Ford School. Yes, I am the alumni on the panel here. When I went here, we did not have this beautiful room or this beautiful building. So I appreciate very much being welcomed back to enjoy the fruits of what has come after I graduated. And I also just wanna, before I start, I think as an alumni and also for the students in the room, I see lots of students. I just wanna give you a second for how did I get here? Like why I'm the voting rights strategist at the ACLU of Michigan. And I just wanna share for a minute like how does that come to be? And the answer is I spent a lot of time protecting voters on election day. I spent a lot of time volunteering in different programs that seek to address challenges that voters have on election day. I did that going back to the time that I graduated actually from here and was waiting for my bar results. And I've done it in every election, primary, presidential, midterm elections. And so what that means is I hear a lot of noise and chaos of what happens on election day, right? I hear all the challenges, well, as many as I can possibly answer the phone, of the challenges that voters are facing when they go to cast their ballot here in Michigan. And so that really became the passion that led to me just really spending all of my time now at the ACLU working on voting rights. So I'm here to talk about proposal three, otherwise known as promote the vote. We need to have catchy names because proposal three, proposal two, it's just not quite as exciting as these awesome names we've come up with. So in my lifetime, which is not necessary, we have plenty of folks on the panel who can talk outside of the scope of my lifetime. Voting rights and access to the ballot was a fundamental right that while people could disagree, perhaps to some degree about the mechanics, there was this general consensus that people should be able to access the ballot. That once we passed the Voting Rights Act and we moved out of the civil rights era, there was more of a frame, at least in my lifetime, that people should be able to vote. Barriers to voting were un-American, right? You shouldn't be erecting barriers to people being able to make their voices heard that the core of our democracy is citizens being able to make their voices heard on election day. And so we had a series of laws that were adopted nationally by Republicans and Democrats, signed by Republican presidents, signed by Democratic presidents. And in these instances, they expanded access to the ballot. So the things that I'm thinking of are the National Voting and Voter Registration Act in 1993, significantly increases access to voter registration. In 2002, we have the Help America Vote Act adopted nationally. Again, significantly addressing access issues, ensuring that individuals are never turned away at the ballot box. That is the direct quote of the Sixth Circuit, interpreting a law under the Help America Vote Act, no citizen should be turned away. Well, you remember my story about how I got here and how I've been listening to the stories of voters? Voters are turned away in every single election. Voters are turned away right here in Ann Arbor. Voters are turned away in the primary. Every election I talk to voters who were turned away at the ballot box. Sometimes I'm able to give them advice and send them back because it's before eight o'clock and they're able to resolve that situation. But not always, just in the primary, I have individuals who were disenfranchised in violation of state and federal law. So that concerns me. Every single, if there's even one voter, that concerns me. That's how passionate I am about it. So we have this nonpartisan history of embracing access. And then one of the things that you may not know is that Michigan, in part due to this gentleman sitting next to me, but others that I'll talk about was a pivotal state in expanding access. So I spoke about the National Voter Registration Act. The National Voter Registration Act is the law that nationally adopted the motor voter program. That's the thing that everybody whose my age or younger is familiar with when you go to get your driver's license, you're able to get registered. Well, as others on the panel can definitely tell you, it didn't used to be so easy. You had to take the onus on yourself to show up at a different elected officials or appointed officials office and fill out a form. It used to be much harder. Well, guess where that amazing innovation that registered millions and millions and millions, I see heads shaking, no question, the extraordinary impact of that innovation. It started right here in Michigan. So under the then Secretary of State, Richard Austin and the gentlemen to my left who will have an opportunity to talk more about this, Michigan was the first state to adopt this innovation. And it wasn't the only innovation that Michigan led on. The second law that I mentioned was the Help America Vote Act. It has a very critical provision where it required states to have a statewide voter registration database. So when you move around the state, you can easily move your registration with you, again, an access, a way to increase access, a way to make sure the individuals are staying registered so they're never silenced at the ballot box. That also was a national innovation that was adopted that began here in Michigan. So Michigan has this extraordinary history as an innovator in so many areas, technology, the automobile industry, but also in voting. But unfortunately at some point that history came to a grinding halt. And so sadly today, Michigan and Mississippi are the only states that have failed to adopt any recent reforms that increase access to the ballot. I just want you to, I want to say that one more time. Michigan and Mississippi are the only states in the country that have failed to adopt recent reforms to increase access to the ballot. What do I mean by that? Name your favorite reform, early voting, no reason absent, T voting, pre-registration, election day registration, same day registration, online voter registration, take your pick. We're the only, it's us and Mississippi. And so what does that tell me? That tells me actually that voting rights is still a very non-partisan issue. Why? Because all the states in the country are finding ways to increase access. And I've been saying that from day one on Proposal Three. Why is that? Because the citizens of this state and the rest of the country believe that voting access is a non-partisan issue. That access is without question, something that citizens who are eligible and meet the requirements of eligibility in our state and every other state should be able to cast their ballot. Elected officials may wrangle about it, they may argue about it, but that's not how the citizens feel. And so Proposal Three comes out of that very shocking statistic. It comes out of that very shocking reality that Michigan has fallen behind. I'm often asked why I'm not an elected official in the state legislature or the state senate, I'm not the governor, I can't answer that question. I think my time is better served trying to solve the problem. So Proposal Three, I have a half sheet if you want it here, you can get a full summary of it. But Proposal Three would adopt a number of amendments to our constitution, they're all in one section, what a number of policies would be enshrined in the constitution that would increase access and also increase security. Because citizens, again, across the political spectrum in a non-partisan way are also concerned about security. And there are things that Michigan can and should be doing. So the first thing that Promote the Vote does, Proposal Three does, is protect the right to a secret ballot. There is language in the constitution right now regarding a secret ballot, but it entrusts the legislature with the authority to protect that. I don't know about you all, but I would rather have my own right to a secret ballot and not leave that to the legislature. So Proposal Three would address that. The second thing is, Proposal Three would enshrine in the constitution the requirement that military and overseas voters be sent to ballot 45 days before. This is mirroring obligations that are in state or federal law, but it's enshrining that in our constitution. And therefore it could not be eliminated by future acts of the legislature. The next thing is automatic voter registration, allowing citizens to be automatically registered unless they refuse, this is still America, you can still choose to say no. But if you don't say no, you're automatic and you're eligible, you're automatically registered to vote at the Secretary of State's office. This is something that is the newest reform of the access to the ballot reforms that have come online, but already in just a few short years, 14 states have adopted automatic voter registration and they're seeing really significant impacts. They're seeing significant impacts because individuals who are registered and are on the rolls are then communicated with by partisan campaigns or nonpartisan campaigns. And so they start to be a part of the democratic little D, civic infrastructure, and then they are not voting necessarily at the same rate that all citizens are voting, but they are voting in significant numbers. And so those individuals would not have gotten registered if there hadn't been automatic voter registration. So I'll quickly move through the other components. It would, Michigan is one of only about a dozen states that has a voter registration deadline tomorrow. And everybody, anybody unregistered in the room, come see me, we can handle that. Ask everybody you know between here and bedtime tonight and all day tomorrow, make sure they're all registered. We have a 30 day voter registration deadline. It's the longest allowed by federal law. Most states don't have a deadline that long anymore. And a number of states have gone to the point of allowing citizens to register up to and including election day. And proposal three would allow that. But in a secure way, you'd have to provide proof of residency and you'd have to appear in person before an election official. This is not new people. The three states that first created an adapted election day voter registration have had it for 40 years. I think we can do it. I think we can. Just a few more, no reason absentee voting, which thank you to the gentleman next to me. Michigan has been trying to get that since 1990. Here we are, 28 years later. Thank God proposal three will finally deliver it to you. It's a very nonpartisan reform, 37 or 38 states have either no reason absentee voting or early voting, so you as a citizen can choose to vote prior to election day if that's what's most convenient for you. Imagine that. Make it convenient for you to vote and therefore you'll make your voice heard. The last two components are straight ticket voting. So the citizens of Michigan have had it for 125 years, 127, I think. Very sadly, it will not be available this year. The citizens have twice had it taken away by the legislature and they've twice put it back in. Here's the dirty little secret. Straight party voting is not a partisan thing. Individuals in Detroit use it and primarily vote Democratic, but so do significant numbers of individuals in Ottawa County and they significantly vote Republican. It's an efficiency that makes it easier for citizens to cast their ballot in an efficient manner. And the last one, and perhaps one of the most important ones I think is an audit. Michigan has had something that is called an audit, but it's not actually checking that how we're tabulating the ballots is also how they were meant to be tabulated. Meaning when you put your ballots into the machine, that what's coming out as the counts of the votes is actually being checked and audited. And so proposal three would implement that as well. And so again, it's this perfect marriage that is being supported by over 70% of voters in recent polls of increasing access and having a more secure election system because we can have both and we deserve to have both. Thank you, Sharon. Now having heard the arguments in favor of the two ballot proposals, we turn to Richard McClellan who will offer some views on the other side of the picture. I've been asked to talk about why the VNP would not be a good state policy. So I'm going to follow strictly that instruction as a complicated proposal. And then I was asked, we had a couple of minutes on the promote the vote proposal that we just heard about. Let me just a bigger picture that is not part of this, but something I've been thinking about because I've been active in this area for 50 years. There seems to be a trend to abandon kind of the old traditional forms of democracy. Representative government, you get your representatives, they manage the government for you. You decide a couple of years later whether you want them in there. We had on the, we've always had in Michigan, it's a good reason this initiative and referendum. The people have always referred to themselves, the ability to do this, but it was a very rare occurrence. But as we have gotten fed up with our legislature, and possibly because of gerrymandering, we more and more are moving toward these other non-traditional methods of running the government, giving people a package deal and a vote up or vote down. And you don't have an opportunity to have the process that I went through for 30 years in the legislature until term limits came along. They used to spend months on legislation, the election code and the election committee was bipartisan, they'd fight over things, but they really got into it. You don't see that anymore. Legislature gets a bill in front of them, they got the votes, they move it out. So the system has changed and the voters response to it has changed. This voters not politicians is an example of that. If voters not, as a grab bag of good and bad provisions, I don't want anybody to suggest that it's all bad. In fact, several of them are either in existing law or would be in anybody's fair system, respecting existing boundaries. Although there are some people that believe those are racist and we should not be recognizing existing county boundaries that were set up 100 years ago. But in general, that's accepted. Minimizing the variance between populations, something that the Supreme Court decided 30, 40 years ago of the one person, one vote. Now they're fighting over whether one person, one vote, who the persons are. Are they only eligible voters in a district or all the persons in the district? I think it's all the persons. The census counts everybody. Prisoners, illegal aliens, children. So that's what I think it should be, but it does get fought over. It's not in this proposal, it accepts certain things. Contiguous districts, gerrymandering is an art. And if we didn't have continuous districts, we'd have a piece of Democrats in the UP attached to a piece in Bay City to create a district or the other way around. So those are, they are decent. Establishing timeline and a procedure is good government. But here's what I oppose about this. It is this, what I called, I was worried about saying, it a Rube Goldberg structure. Very complicated. And they keep talking about non-partisan, non-partisan, no politicians. Well, the commission is selected by a partisan elected secretary of state. She is to generate a list of 10,000 voters randomly invited by her or him, I guess there's only two, there are two women running to apply. And then the secretary of state randomly selects from these pools, Democrats, Republicans, and self-identifying as being unaffiliated. Doesn't mean they're not partisan. It means they're not affiliated. It doesn't mean they're independent. They can be very strong partisans and probably will be just as long and they can technically show they are unaffiliated. So I guarantee you there will be an effort over the years to make sure each party has its own list of unaffiliated people that will be in the pools. The biggest proposal that I oppose in this is this term, communities of interest, to be protected. I gather it's used in other states, but I'm kind of the old school. Political districts represent people in a particular geographic district. Now, we shifted away from that a few decades ago because of the racial issue. And we now, that is a community of interest that is particularly well protected. And if you watch the process, it's been used by both parties. It's used because of the way people live. There are more minority voters in urban areas. You can, as they say, pack them and stack them. You can squeeze more minority districts into some of these bigger urban areas. And disadvantage may be Democrats that aren't the right color from this. And it goes the other way, they go back and forth. Who they cut deals with has been amazing if you read the history of it. So once we get communities of interest, and to me, this is largely a result of the trend over the last couple, not right away, but a few times that the Democratic Party no longer represents issues. It represents communities of interest. If you talk to people to go to their convention, it's all about which caucus you go to. Are you in the urban caucus? Are you in the gay caucus? Are you in the, it's much more where, how the parties see themselves, and they see themselves as a cluster of these groups that all have to be accommodated. And I would say there's a community of interest in most of the issues, but I don't think that's a good idea. And so the commission has to defend these districts through maps and statistics and so on in the proposal. But how are they gonna disclose who the communities of interest are that it has favored in this plan and who are the other communities of districts that are gonna be disfavored? They never answer that, and Nancy's taking notes, maybe she'll answer it. But I don't, to me, as a lawyer and somebody who gets into this stuff, I guarantee you they give me some huge battles over within the various communities of interest that are excluded compared to the ones that are included. One of the things that I just didn't like in here, it bans commissioners from talking to ordinary people. You can't talk to anybody. You can only talk to your staff, attorneys, experts, and consultants. Oh, I'm sorry, these are a group of randomly selected people. I want them walking around talking to people, saying, hey, I'm on this commission. I just, my name got drawn, I'm gonna do my job. What do you think? Can't do that. You can only talk to your staff, your attorneys, your experts, and your consultants. I don't think that's good public policy. That gives a lie to this idea that this is for people, not politicians. I think that it just, it's wrong. And in final conclusion, I think this is a, it tends to do too much and ends up with a complex structure that will end in endless disputes. Now I'm 76, I'm not practicing law anymore, but many of my younger colleagues are gonna have a lot of fun with this, and it's gonna, anybody thinks that this is the perfect structure that will last forever in Michigan. Because it's the fairest, and the people will love it, and the politicians will accept it. I don't think so. We fight over politics because politics is a tool by which we allocate wealth in our state. We decide who gets money. It's all about the money, it'll continue to be, and they'll continue to be fights over it. I'm gonna stop on that one, I'm gonna give you two minutes on promote the vote. I think to promote the vote is largely just a grab bag of good government ideas that have been kicking around. The Republicans have basically stopped them, is correct. They have operated on another model that is the integrity of the process requires procedural steps and filing deadlines and all this kind of stuff. That was the view of both parties and our political system for 100 years or so. We really have been moving along toward a much more open process. For example, straight party line voting, Republicans block that because they think it favors Democrats. No reason absentee, they block that because they think it serves people that aren't serious about voting and don't have reason and they shouldn't do it. I don't see any wrong with those proposals. They are, I wouldn't put them in the Constitution, but they're fine. But I think there's some other things that may or may not create problems. There is this idea of automatic registration as a result of doing business with the secretary of state. All you have to do is be, do business with her or him. That's not the worst thing in the world if it's regulated. Now, the secretary of state doesn't necessarily determine whether you're a citizen or whether you're eligible to vote or you're a former felon when you're doing business with the secretary of state. That's not their business. And then, all of a sudden, it's been happening where people who are not citizens go in on this motor voter, get their driver's license, and the clerk was, oh, do you want to vote? Boom, yes. And they're not eligible. The registration by mail is new. It's something that I wouldn't vote for, but I think the way they've written it where you have to show up, a real person has to show up the first time you vote with a real ID makes it worth. Same day registration. I have been involved in a lot of elections. For many, many years, I sort of ran what the Republicans called the voter integrity unit to see what was going on, it was bad. The Democrats called us the voter suppression unit. They're winning that argument, unfortunately. But what I found was almost everything we got on election day with people all over the state was no corruption, just people made mistakes. It's getting harder and harder to have skilled election day workers, and therefore, it's getting raggedy around the edges sometimes, but there's very little corruption in my mind, organized corruption. It doesn't mean some voters are not treated badly. I argue that it's mostly the people that are not. The worst part of this provision that I don't, that I feel is if you end up permanently locking these things into the Constitution, you eliminate the normal legislative process. Now, I'm sure all these fine left-wing groups that are listed as a draft sponsors of it think they have created the perfect model for elections, and they're gonna lock it in the Constitution. The truth is in about 10 years, they will want something different too, and they'll have to go back to the people instead of going back to the legislature. So, overall, proposal three is not the worst, but it has some bad things in it that will at least get me to vote no. Proposal two is awful, but you've heard the other side of that and with that I'll stop and listen to our expert down the table. And now we turn to the professional election administrator on our panel, Chris Thomas, who has served governors and secretaries of state with both parties, and it turned his hair gray maybe, but he was there for three and a half decades, and we'll get his views on these two proposals. Chris. Thank you very much. I'd like to thank the Ford School for holding this, the marvelous opportunity for everyone to get a good view of what's going on with these proposals. And it's good to be with my friend Richard on a panel. You always know where Richard is. You never have any doubt. And, you know, the ACL used to sue me all the time, and in retirement they've become my best friends, so it's been just great. So I did work in this business for a long time. I was the director of elections for 36 years. I was with the department for 40, and I worked for the Federal Election Commission for a few years before that. So it's been a long haul in election administration, and as an administrator, I was a civil servant, so I didn't go out and support ballot proposals. It's the first time I've had this opportunity, so I'm trying to catch up a bit. So just for, I guess, notice here, I've not endorsed proposal two, but I have endorsed proposal three. And I'm not opposed to proposal two, but I just haven't done a public endorsement. So I'll make a few comments about proposal two and then move on to proposal three, which gets my blood running a little thicker. So it is complicated. I mean, Richard's got it down exactly right. This is a complicated process. It always has been. There's a lot of moving parts, and the lawyers will do well. Journalism will have a good time following them, but I think it's time to try something new. So we've had Republicans have had their good fortune to control the entire process in 2001 when the districts were drawn and again in 2011. So they've had basically a 20-year period where they've had all the marbles. And by the time they got to 2011, they might've gotten what some would call a little greedy, which is why we're here today on this issue because people, I think, believe it's gone a little too far. I mean, you look at our state Senate, there's 27 Republicans and 11 Democrats. Now, it's just hard to imagine in this state how that could be. Well, it's the art of drawing the line. So I would make a couple other comments here. So one of the deals is, you know, there are four Republicans, four Democrats, and five unaffiliated. And Richard's right, I mean, it's gonna, how they end up defining that term is gonna be critical. But there's one thing in Lansing's thought, which I think doesn't really mirror the rest of the electorate, is that people's partisan affiliations, whether they're hard or loose, somehow or another define their character. And in Lansing, that's pretty much the case. I mean, you read this or that and they believe that there is no middle ground. I think most people have a leaning one way or another, but it's not the most central thing in their life to be a lean Republican or lean Democratic. They have many other issues that motivate them. And they may be ideology and they may be just issues. And of course, we're all starting to move is what they tell us nationally to get, you know, ideologically, we're finding our islands. And I'm in the territory of Ann Arbor today. So when they talk about drawing lines that don't disproportionately advantage or disadvantage, one of the political parties, well, the Republicans aren't gonna do so well here. And they won't do so well in Detroit, but they'll do very well in many other areas of the state. So it's gonna, there will be more competitive districts, but not every district's gonna be competitive. So you just need to keep that in mind because of the nature of the populations that they represent. And Richard is right, this concept of community of interests. That is gonna be a real linchpin in this in terms of them figuring out how this is going to work. And also this concept of the acceptable measures of partisan fairness. This is the heart of the litigation that's been going on is how do you determine fairness? And are these efforts from Wisconsin and elsewhere to try to get the Supreme Court to recognize that and make that a factor? I mean, right now, one of the apportionment factors that's been approved by the U.S. Supreme Court is that you don't throw the incumbent out of its district. Now that's, to most people, kind of a ridiculous deal. So in California, which is very, I think that's the one that's most similar to Michigan, the way it worked, and it was kind of interesting because they used it in 2011. So 45% of the incumbents had territory that wasn't part of their district before, and 41% of them had more newer voters that they never represented. So it did mix things up a bit, and they didn't consider where incumbents were, so they threw a lot of incumbents together, and sometimes they ran against each other, sometimes they just retired. So I think that this is a proposal that's got some merit because of where we find themselves. Now, if the Democrats get all those marbles, they're such nice people, they would never do the same thing, would they? You're sure they'll try? Yes, they would, and yes they would because that's the game. That's exactly the way the game works. There's nothing evil lurking in this, it's just the game of, this is a zero-sum game, folks. We do not have proportionate representation. You either win the district or you lose it, and that's what that's all about. So I'm gonna shift gears here. So I wanna talk a little bit about proposal three, promote the vote. This is a critical opportunity for Michigan to catch up. Michigan has lagged behind the rest of the states in terms of access to the ballot. And the way it's been done in the state before the last decade and a half was that access would be increased and there'd be a measurable deterrent to balance it. So in other words, you don't just slam the door and say fraud, fraud, fraud. We hear the fraudsters all the time and that is the biggest untruth out there. And I, Richard, hit it right. There is not massive fraud, but that is the reason that's given in many cases of why we're not moving forward. Term limits may well play a role in that, that is probably one of the most unhealthy things that Michigan has ever done. So when you look at no reason absentee balloting, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration highly recommended that every state should give the voters that opportunity to vote. Michigan's one of 13 states that does not do that. Now it's funny, we give everyone 60 and older the opportunity to vote no reason. Age is not a reason, folks. That's just a grant of no reason absentee voting to one segment of the population. And they've handled it so well that I'm sure that the rest of the population can get on board and have learned from senior citizens like myself that this works just fine. Automatic registration, I mean, look, the beginning and the end of automatic registration is the question. Nobody's being automatically registered without them standing there and answering a question. Right now the Secretary of State said, do you want to register to vote? Yes or no? This will say you'll be registered to vote unless you decline to be registered. That's the only difference. All the citizenship safeguards done at Secretary of State's office remain in full effect. So non-citizens are not sneaking through because of this proposal. So I think that's something that everyone needs to bear in mind. And it actually follows the National Voter Registration Act which says a driver's license application shall be a voter registration application unless the voter declines in writing. We don't do it that way. We should be doing it that way. That's the federal law. So the safeguards are there. This is just a good way to go about it. In straight party voting, now, we've had consolidation of elections in this state for the last decade and a half, which is a good thing. We've eliminated all these special elections all over the place and gone to four election dates and now three. But when we did that, straight party voting was a predicate. And so what did the legislature do? Knowing the straight party voting was there. They loaded up the general election ballot. First, they put all the villages on the general election ballot. Then they put all the school districts on the election, the general election day ballot. And now they've permitted cities to go on to the election day ballot in November of the even year. So we're making this a longer and longer process for voters. And without straight party voting, it's just gonna make it worse for everybody. And obviously they put an appropriation in to take care of the, to kill the ability to have a referendum because you can't referendum appropriation bill. It's a very sneaky tactic that's being used now in Lansing. When they did it before and 64 in 2002, bam, as a referendum, overwhelmingly reenacted by the voters. So I would note that the other things that deal with registration in terms of moving to 30 day, that's fine, that's not gonna cause any problems. We have a lot of electronic registrations now that are coming in. So there's no real clerk issue there. The 14 days before the election, it gotta show up in person. You've gotta have proof, a document, proving where you register or where you're a resident. And this is gonna be a very low volume. It's an extra trip, folks, that people have to make to the clerk's office. Election day registration is really a safety net. It'll really kind of remove what we have now with the affidavit ballots. And one thing I wanna make absolutely clear, this is not done in the polling place on election day. This will only be done in a clerk's office. So it's not like people are gonna inundate polling places and try to force themselves onto the file. They're gonna have to go to the actual city clerk and go through this process to get on the ballot. In the post-election audits, this fits right in with the national security issues on our election system. And Michigan is stepping up to this and it's time for them to really take this on. The bureau's done a great job in Lansing and we're ready for that next step. They have come up with risk limiting audits that can use statistical sampling that actually can tell you something about the results rather than just taking 5% and trying to make some sense out of it. So these are rights, these are rights for voters and these are things that are being done, they're common sense programs that are being done in many other states without any big fraud issues or anything else. So it's really time for Michigan to step up and open up access and maintain security. Thank you. Well, thank you to our four panelists and now we'll turn to some questions from the audience. Four Ford School students will be responsible for sorting the questions and choosing them. They represent two of the sponsors of our panel, the student groups We Listen and Domestic Policy Corps. Two of them have a microphone and they will introduce themselves. The other two lack of microphones that let me introduce them. The folks who were sorting the questions down here are Chris Garzon Rivera from the Domestic Policy Corps and Nick Tomano from We Listen. And Tom Ivaco, the Associate Director of Close Up is giving him a hand here on the end. So let me turn first to the, oh, before we turn to the questions, lesson that our timekeeper who has kept us right on schedule here is Heather Gittingham and we thank her. So let me turn now to the students who will be reading the questions, let them introduce themselves and ask the first question. Hi, I'm Sophie. I'm a first year MPP student here and I am also part of the Domestic Policy Corps and also as a lifelong Michigander and someone very interested in democratic engagement as clearly so many other people are. Thank you all very much for being here. We have a lot of really great questions so we'll try to get through as many as we can but maybe just keep that in mind while we're going through that. We'll try to get to as many as possible. Our first one is in regards to Proposition Three. Has research been done to estimate how much this proposal may increase voter participation rates? Yes, the Center for American Progress did a report earlier this year. They've done a number of reports that have been really helpful for me. One was on election security but then they did a report where they estimated the impact of all the sort of common sense reforms that different states are doing. And so what we're saying now is that it would increase turnout by several hundred thousand voters in 2020. According to the Center for American Progress they would estimate about 400,000 voters but I'm guessing this gentleman might have a... No. Okay, all right, so that's... You know, it's a little bit hard to predict because any forms of those research are always done in another state, right? And so all the different intricacies of an election system can have an impact but that's the estimate that we've been going with because they did the report to help us out with it. Wonderful. So my name is Allie Berry. I am a senior in the undergraduate BA program here and I'm involved with, we listen. Our question is for Nancy about prop two. How would it be possible to stop lobbyists and their dollars from influencing the members of the commission of this redistricting committee? Right, so again, I would go to transparency. So Mr. McClellan said earlier that the commissioners would not be able to be talking to the public. That's not true. It's that they would have to, the commissioners would have to be talking to the public at open meetings only. There'd be no more of this back room kind of secretive redistricting that's going on right now. So we know what we have right now which is that lobbyists go and they're able to have influence on the maps. Again, this bridge article uncovered, you know, I mean, they were going through the emails that were uncovered during this litigation and the people, the consultants that were drawing these maps shared them with the DeVos family and other big Republican donors for their input. So that is happening right now. It's just that we don't actually know who's involved and what influence they have unless it comes to light through litigation. Under our proposal, the commissioners, again, they would be written into the constitution that they would have to conduct all of their business in the light of day. So that's how you would know. This is perhaps a little bit towards proposition three. What is any of your opinion on laws such as what the Australians have, that mandate that each voter must vote? This question writer notes that perhaps it's a little invasive on people's rights but it's an interesting idea. Do you have thoughts? Do you have any? Yeah, well, that would be interesting to try to do in this country. I think every voter should vote. What I believe they do is levy a little fine or tax on them if they don't vote. It might stimulate a few to do that but one thing we have in this country right now is a right not to vote. Anybody else wanna comment on that one? Okay, so this one is for Mr. McClellan. The question is, you touched on a little bit, how you thought. Could you speak up a little bit? I'm deaf and this is your name. That's okay. You mentioned briefly that you thought that prop three wasn't necessarily the worst and so the question is what election reforms would you support if any at all? Perhaps the elimination of the Electoral College or a ranked voting system to help move politicians to the middle. Okay, you got to slow down and speak up. Okay. Regarding prop three, which you mentioned wasn't necessarily the worst, the question is what election reforms would you support? What election reforms would I support? Right, and then they give two examples, one being the elimination of the Electoral College and the other being a ranked voting system. Well, I'm conservative and I tend not to change something we've had for a couple hundred years but I do believe that the rules from time to time in elections should be changed. I'm not opposed at all. In fact, I've been involved in them for 40 years, legislative changes to modernize and make our rules of the elections more consistent with the Constitution that says preserve the purity of elections. So as new technology comes in, things like same day registration, a number of those things might work fine. I'm not at all opposed to them. But things like the Electoral College, that is such a huge change. It's like the national one person, one vote that would shift all the power to California, New York and Texas. I'm against that. And the guy running that is a Republican. I believe he's delusional. It's kind of an ugly situation, the Electoral College but it certainly reflects the fact that the US, the United States is a group of sovereign states. We aren't one country that has one population. So I'm against that sort of thing and a number of other. Give me almost any issue and I'll give you an opinion one way or the other. Because I spent a lot of time on a lot of things. I'll just say one more thing that I was gonna bring up. A voter who let everybody vote in some communities means illegal aliens, people just come over. They, that I don't believe in. I believe the vote is a right of a citizen. And if you've ever been to a citizenship or just wearing in ceremony and you see new Americans and what they think about, their adopted country and the rights that they have, they do not want people who haven't gone through the work because it's hard work to be a citizen. So I'm in favor of voting for citizens, all citizens, unless you're excluded. And I'm not, if you're in prison, no. But if you get out of prison, yes. So these are complicated issues and you're not gonna be able to solve them by one shot ballot proposal put together by some group in a dark room. Now, I was not invited to their drafting sessions. I guarantee you, voters not populations would put together by a very secretive group. Well, that leads right into our next question, which is coming to us from Twitter. What is the logic of denying the right to vote to convicted felons? Not only the ones paroled, but also ones currently incarcerated and this can be for Richard or Mr. McCullen, but also for any of the panelists. I think the only theory is that they have forfeited their right to be treated as a regular citizen. And I used to be chairman of the Michigan Corrections Commission. And I'd go down to the prisons a couple of times and it's one of those things that I think may just be outdated. I firmly believe that if you've done your time and you're back in society, you should not be disqualified from getting licenses for professions. They rejected two former women that were inmates and had learned to be massage therapists in prison so they could get a job. So they went to get a job and the licensing board of the same state government said, no, you can't do it. I just don't believe in that. If you're a former convicted felon, you should be treated to all the rights of a citizen restored to his or her. When they go to prison or certain things, that is a policy decision. I don't know that I would make, but it was made and it's not unreasonable to say you have forfeited certain rights while you've forfeited your personal freedom for one thing. So that's my view on that one. I would just make a quick comment. So in Michigan, as Richard's describing, when you're released, you've served your time, you have your rights back and there's no process you need to go through. And this is on the Florida ballot this year. We're in Florida, you don't get your rights back and you have to go to a board that I believe the governor participates in a very lengthy process in order to get those back. So there are big differences across the country on how states handle this. Okay, great, this is another question for Mr. Thomas. You mentioned term limits as bad. Can you elaborate on that and do others have thoughts, especially their impact on gerrymandering? Yeah, I think they stink. And I think as Richard's indicated, it has had a very bad effect on the continuity of government. The idea, I mean, everybody's term limit, you can vote them out. I mean, the people stay because people continue to vote them in. And so what happened in my opinion is that the power shifted from these legislative committees, like Richard mentioned, back in those days, the election committee, it was very robust. And these folks were on that for a number of years. They understood a good part of the process. The folks that come now, they're six years in the House, they're eight years in the Senate, they don't stay on the same committees, they move around, they don't understand this stuff. The best thing about elections to them is they got elected under the rules and it was good for them. But they don't really understand the intricacies. So where's that power gone? It's gone to lobbyists and a little bit to the bureaucracy because these folks don't know. And then when the committee staff, when they started retiring, they lost everything. So it's been a bad deal. And I don't think the state's been served well. This is a concern that Mr. McCullen brought up. Perhaps this would be for Ms. Wang to respond to, but proposal two proposes a 13-member board composed of four Democrats, four Republicans, and five independents or non-affiliated. What is or how would independents be selected? Will it be verified that they are independent or non-affiliated? So if I may just start with a clarification. So Mr. McCullen said that the Secretary of State would be selecting these commissioners. That's not true. So people would have the ability to apply. And then the selection is only just her or him randomly choosing applications from the pool of people that applied. In terms of party affiliation, so here in Michigan, as many of you know, we don't have party registration. And so on the application form, you'd have to self-identify as a Republican or a Democrat or non-affiliated under oath. The term unaffiliated or affiliated is ripe for a lot of litigation. Are we gonna force party registration? So you're not registered. What do we mean by not affiliated? Again, it doesn't mean you don't have partisan views. It means you're not affiliated at that time with a particular party. I'm just a lawyer. I look for all the monkey wrenches that we could possibly throw at this if it's adopted. I won't be doing it, but I know other lawyers will. This is a question from Ms. Delente. You referred to voting access reform as bipartisan, but historically Republicans have not supported greater access to polls. How much reform across the nation has been accomplished by citizen-led ballot initiatives versus legislative reform? Well, that's tough. Okay, so I sometimes people push back on me and they ask this question. They want me to say that it is a partisan issue. And if you notice, I said citizens, citizens and the public think of this as a non-partisan issue. I can't necessarily speak to every individual state legislature or even our own state legislature over the last few years. I obviously know, and I wouldn't suggest otherwise, that since the election of Barack Obama, there's been a wave of anti-voter laws around the country, most significantly voter ID laws. And I'm aware of that, but I don't think that negates the fact that you've also seen a variety of states with Republican governors and Republican legislators adopting reforms. And so I think one thing that Mr. Thomas has been working on is online voter registration. 38 states have online voter registration now. That, by definition, must include red states, right? Another example just off the top of my head would be automatic voter registration. Automatic voter registration is the newest. Some states that come to mind that have it are Alaska, not a particularly blue state in case you didn't know. And Alaska actually adopted it through a ballot initiative. So in Alaska's case, you are automatically registered to vote when you get, I don't remember the term, but in Alaska when you get benefits under their oil and gas program. So when you become a part of that program, you also get automatically registered. And that was through ballot initiative. I'm not sure that I can't give you exact numbers on how many states have adopted reform through ballot initiatives. The other one that comes to mind is Maryland, I think adopted some reforms through ballot initiative. I think if you have a legislature that's willing to provide the reform through the legislative process, you don't take the extraordinary expense and hundreds of thousands of signatures to try and do it through a ballot initiative. But after 28 years of waiting for just no reason, absentee voting, it didn't seem like there were any other options. This will be the final question we have time for. This can be for any of our panelists for either of the propositions. What impact do these proposals have on marginalized or economically disadvantaged urban communities was proposed in the question? Marginalized, what kind of? Marginalized groups or economically disadvantaged communities. I'll just go first, cause I just talked. So I mean, one of the things, I mean, I'm just, and then I can be done. So, you know, individuals who struggle to vote and register are often individuals who move a lot, right? Who have low levels of education or low income. Why? Because all those things kind of fit together, right? If you have a low income, you are more likely to be moving. Your home situation and your housing is likely to be less stable. And so the more often you're moving, the more often you have to be updating your voter registration. And the more likely your registration is not gonna be valid. For me, at this point in my life in the same house for 18 years, I don't have to think about that. But for an individual whose housing is not stable, it's a much greater barrier. So I think, you know, providing an opportunity for eligible citizens to register on election day means that if you happen to have moved because that's your circumstance due to economics or otherwise, that you'll be able to remedy that. You'll be able to get re-registered on election day and still have your voice. And the fact that your economic circumstance or your housing circumstance doesn't necessarily fit, you know, as well with our voter registration system won't disenfranchise you. I agree with that. Urban area, this moving, moving and switching schools and all that is a very disruptive of these citizens' ability to access the services that we others expect. Yeah, I want to say one more thing before we go. If you haven't read it, our good friend back who runs Pridge Magazine, read this magazine, read this article about how a shadow Republican group, Jerry Manard, Michigan, sparking a backlash. I loved it. His reporters have really dug deep into what we thought was secret rooms where we came up with this stuff. But so it's a good magazine if you want to read about how it really happens. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As to marginalized communities, under our proposal, the commission would have to abide by the Federal Voting Rights Act. That's federal law. It applies now, it applies under this proposal. And I would just say that as to all voters, including historically disenfranchised voters, they would have their votes count with a yes vote on proposal too. They would not be packed and cracked into different districts just because, you know, they can reliably count it on to vote for one party or another. Every vote would actually count. I would give a cautionary tale. So the U.S. Supreme Court last spring issued a decision called Houston after the Ohio Secretary of State. And in Ohio, this law said that if you didn't vote in an election, then a cancellation notice would be sent to you. And in that packet of material you get is a little card that you're to return if you want to stay on the file or you need to vote sometime within the next two federal elections. The NVRA, the National Voter Registration Act, says you cannot even initiate the cancellation process based on the failure to vote. Well, that's exactly what they do. And for whatever reason, the U.S. Supreme Court said, well, they don't really cancel them because of that. They cancel them because they forgot to send a little card back. Well, how many little cards do you receive in the mail that end up going in the trash, right, that you never quite get to? So what this would result in, in Michigan, if that were implemented here, and there have been some discussions along those lines, would be thousands and thousands of voters thrown off the rolls having no idea that it was because of this little card four years ago that they didn't respond to. Election Day Registration is the safety net to any of that type of activity to give people of all economic situations the ability to get back on the file and vote on Election Day. Anyone else got a final few thoughts they want to place before the audience? I did write once, non-citizens, and I circled it a few times. As a voting rights strategist, the nightmare of non-citizens is just so frustrating because I think, as Mr. Thomas pointed out, we have a system for registering individuals right now, and they're required to check a box and affirm their eligibility, which includes that they are a citizen. And perhaps I just need to say affirmatively, Proposal 3 is not going to allow citizens to become registered. There's nothing about Proposal 3 that allows, sorry, non-citizens, that allows non-citizens to become registered. And no voting right advocate I've ever met is advocating for non-citizens who don't have a right to vote under state law here in Michigan to be able to register and vote. But it is the boogeyman, it is the nightmare that's thrown out there, no matter what proposal you put forward. I'm sure if it had been the talking point back when motor voter was adopted here in Michigan, it would have been the argument for why we shouldn't have motor voter. It is just the argument, no matter whether you're adopting the most basic thing that every state already has, or you're adopting something new and novel, and none of the things in Proposal 3 are new and novel, they've all been adopted in other states, and their voting system is not falling down full of illegal citizens on the voter registration rolls. So it's just very disappointing that that's always the argument, regardless of whether it has any basis in reality. And that includes Kansas. Kansas, yes, Kansas has, yes. So Kansas has also adopted reforms, even though they have the individual who's most concerned with non-citizens, obsessed, some might say, with non-citizens. Okay, well that brings our panel to a close. I hope you'll join me in thanking the panelists. And I hope you'll join us in a reception outside in the Great Hall, outside of the auditorium. If you'd like to talk to one of the panelists about a point, we suggest you find them out in the Great Hall, because we're gonna be taking equipment down and otherwise getting in the way in here. So thank you all for coming, and we look forward to talking to you outside.