 Good evening. Welcome to the League of Women Voters of Boulder County Community Conversation on Redistricting in Colorado. We're so glad you joined us tonight about such an important and timely topic. The League of Women Voters was founded 101 years ago following the successful passage of the 19th Amendment. The League is a nonpartisan organization with a mission to empower voters and defend democracy. We envision a democracy in which every person has the right, desire, the knowledge and the confidence to participate. Our local League chapter is 90 years strong. We work in Boulder County to encourage informed and active participation in government and to influence public policy through education and advocacy. If you are interested in joining the League or making a contribution to our work or both, visit LWVBC.org for more information or click on the link that we'll post in the chat. Now to the purpose of tonight's event. For many years, the League of Women Voters has worked on the national, state and local levels to ensure that congressional districts are drawn in a manner that is fair and equitable. Our organization opposes gerrymandering or drawing districts to benefit one political party or voting population over another. In 2018, we strongly advocated for amendments Y and Z, anti-gerrymandering in Colorado, which led to creation of an independent redistricting commission, and a process that we believe is much improved from a partisan, less inclusive approach. With some delays due to COVID, the Colorado Independent Redistricting Commission has been working on draft maps. And next week, on August 10th and 11th, Boulder County community members have the opportunity to participate in public hearings in Longmont and Boulder respectively to provide comments on these maps. The purpose of this community conversation is to share information on the road to the redistricting process, an overview of that process, and how Boulder County community members can be engaged in that process. The League of Women Voters does not currently have a position on the draft redistricting maps. Because this event is virtual and we have such a great turnout, we're going to use the chat function to take questions. Myself and our operations director Mandy Nuku will monitor the chat and post questions to our guest presenter tonight. We may not get to all the questions and comments. We ask for your patience as we cover as much ground as possible before the end of the hour. And now I'd like to introduce our special guest tonight, Dr. Beth Momskog. Beth is an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Colorado College and a member of the board of directors for the League of Women Voters of Colorado. She's been researching mathematical aspects of fair redistricting with a special focus on Colorado since 2018. She's been presenting on redistricting for the League and many, many other organizations across the state, and we're so glad she could fit us into her busy schedule. Beth, thank you so much and feel free to go ahead. Thanks very much, Elizabeth and Mandy for setting this up. Thanks to the League of Women Voters Boulder County more generally for having me here and just having such a great and active chapter and setting up an event that's so important to the community. I'll go ahead and just jump in here. I'll let you know that I plan to give you sort of an overview of the background that you might want in order to consider these maps. I'll show you some pictures of the maps themselves that are being proposed and talk a little bit about the fairness criteria that the map drawers have been asked to consider when they were constructing these maps. And if we have time at the end, I'll spend a little bit of time maybe giving you a little perspective on how mathematics can come into this. In particular, if we have a few moments I'll share about a technique called ensemble analysis which is a way that can help assess partisan bias in maps. So anyway, let's just jump right in. Got some slides for you today. Okay, so I'll get those going. Okay, so I think I can see the chat and so I, if you have a question you're welcome to put into the chat and I may be able to answer it as we go along. But if I don't I'll try and get to it at the end, but do please please feel free to put anything in there if you want immediate clarification and I'll try to try to answer it if I can get to it. Thanks so much for sharing this time with me tonight. I want to just start off with a, a few words about where we are. What how does redistricting work in Colorado and you know how did it get this way. So redistricting is the process that happens every 10 years after each census, when states are reapportioned congressional districts in proportion to their population. And then each state is required to divide themselves up into the correct number of geographic pieces so that each of those seats represents contiguous that means one piece geographic area in the state that has as nearly as possible equal population. Okay, so the, the reason that we redistrict is to obey the principle of one person one vote, so that each person in a state and in the country more broadly is able to have as much as possible equal political power. Okay, so in Colorado this product as it was in many states for a long time, this process used to be done by the state legislature, and this could cause problems with the party that was in power in the state legislature, creating districts that were beneficial to them, the process known as partisan gerrymandering. So this process first shifted in Colorado in 1974, when the Colorado reapportionment commission was created. This was a commission that was charged with creating the state legislative districts in Colorado, the congressional districts in Colorado were always drawn through the state legislature through until very recently in 2018 when amendments why NZ were passed okay so what are amendments why NZ. So, why NZ are amendments why for the congressional districts and Z for the state legislative districts if I remember correctly, the fundamentally change the way redistricting happens, takes it out of the hands of the state legislature, or in the case of the state legislative districts of a politically appointed commission, and puts it in the hands of an independent commission. In fact, two independent commissions one for the state legislative districts and one for the congressional districts. So this fairly and it also sets out some pretty strict fairness criteria and process for creating the commissions and for creating these maps that is designed to be transparent and as fair as possible. This amendment was the sort of dream of many people. It was a compromise project between both progressive and conservative groups. Tony Larson from the League of Women Voters was very involved in the process as well as Kathleen Curry, a former state legislature who was a state legislator who's unaffiliated. There were a lot of groups involved in creating this compromise. The League of Women Voters who you see here advocating for the passage of these amendments in 2018. Some of you will recognize Barb and Jean in these pictures. Anyway, I believe when voters was very much in favor, and it was a real really a bipartisan and unaffiliated project to pass these amendments with great popular support, huge bipartisan support both in the, in the population the voting population and in the state legislature. So these were passed in 2018 and we're kind of rolling them out for the first time this year so it's a big and exciting process. So how does this, how does this work. So the process set out in the law created these two commissions, each consisting of 12 people. The 12 people should be for Democrats for Republicans and for unaffiliated voters in each case. There are many qualifications to try and keep the people who are on the commissions from being especially beholden to a political party, and that they can't be paid lobbyists and various other qualifications. There were a few thousand applications, and that was due back in November, and then the selection process began in January and this is sort of a diagram that shows what's going on. So this is all happened so I won't spend too much time here but you can kind of see that there's a lot of processing to try and keep anyone from being able to really game the system here and to make this, getting on this commission, really make the commission really be representative of the state and not allow people to sort of push one particular interest that people maybe wouldn't want on that commission. Okay, so what are the requirements that the commission is asked to obey. Well, so the districts that they draw, first of all need to have equal population. Now, again, equal populations the foundation of fair redistricting because it ensures that people have equal political power. So this is a pretty important redistricting criteria. And of course it can be very hard to draw districts that have exactly equal population. Just to, I'll get into the data aspects in a few minutes here, but the census that is taken every 10 years. Does describe or doesn't find, you know, try to count all of the people in the country, but it doesn't really stated of like where every single person lives and what their, you know, address is, instead it aggregates information to the census block essentially like one city block. So that's the smallest scale at which we have population information. And so these districts have to be drawn out of census blocks in some way. And so, you know, because those are whole numbers of people, they, you know, often don't have one person in each block, you are going to end up with some variation often just based on just based on how many people live in each place. Okay, so in any case, they need to have equal population and that's a hard problem already. As we mentioned earlier, composed of contiguous geographic areas, so one piece. As you see this example down on the bottom right, these are districts from the previous redistricting in Maryland, and you can see that as much as this contiguity is would say that you would like to have each thing be one piece, but you can see here how contiguity is a little complicated in a setting where you have things like islands and sort of pieces of land that don't connect at all. So one piece is a simple idea but even that can become a little bit complicated when you start really breaking it down. So they need to comply with the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 as amended, meaning that no one's right to vote or electoral power should be their right to vote should not be denied or diluted based on their race or language minority status. So the Voting Rights Act has some requirements that we'll talk about a little bit more in a few minutes here but it's really important that we take have very good demographic information in order to make sure that this Voting Rights Act is being respected. So what else needs to happen? Well, those are sort of the top three. After that, it can become important to try and create good districts where good districts can mean a lot of things. We would like a district to reflect a community and so we would like to preserve whole communities of interest. Okay, and I can tell you a little bit more about that definition in a few minutes here. And whole political subdivisions meaning we would like to keep counties whole as much as possible cities, towns, school districts, any of those political subdivisions are things that we would like to keep hold of possible. We would like the districts to be as compact as reasonably possible. Well, so compact means it's all kind of shoved into a small piece, right, so we're not going for further away population, instead of closer population to kind of try and reach like the population of the district. So trying to decide whether something's really compact can be hard when you're trying to like really quantify it. This district in Maryland that sort of snakes all over the place here. This is a pretty good example of not compact. So just, you know, how do we judge compactness, sometimes you know it when you see it. And finally, we're asked to that is map drives are asked to maximize the number of politically competitive districts. So that's a, an objective that political scientists and many sort of people thinking about it have found to be a good way to get people involved into maybe reduce polarization. So this was incorporated into the law in Colorado in 2018. Okay, finally districts have a couple things they can't do. They cannot be drawn for the purpose of either protecting incumbents, or any declared candidate for the house, or any political party, and they cannot be drawn to deny or bridge the right of any citizen to vote on account of race or language. Again, this is sort of reiterating something that is laid out in the voting rights act of 1965. Okay, so those are the rules for redistricting and there's a lot of them really. So how do we organize them. These criteria are complicated and there's a lot of them. So the legislative council where the non partisan staff have organized these into sort of three tiers. First tier are all of equal importance that is essential that the districts have equal population. So we're going with the VRA and are contiguous. And then of secondary importance but still very important are the ideas of preserving communities of interest, political subdivisions like counties and cities, and keeping districts compact. And then after all those things have been considered the map drawers should maintain as many competitive districts as possible. Okay, so this is the order in which we're asked to think about these. If you're thinking about these criteria, you might start to think about well how do we know if they're being met. So we have to come up with a way to kind of measure these things and it can be more complicated than you might initially think. For some of the reasons that I've already laid out. So, first of all, equal population. Now this is supposed to be down to one person for the congressional districts. So, ideally, there would be only a variation of most one person between any congressional district in the state. This can be very hard to realize. And this is not always needed to be true if it can be justified for important other reasons. But we're ideally looking for exact population quality. Okay, for the state legislative districts because they're smaller, it's can be very hard to get exact equality and so Colorado law gives us a leeway of 5% between the largest and smallest district. And if you do have variations they need to be justified by other considerations I can't just be there because like, oh, we'd like it that way. Now this equal population problem, as I said, we use the census data in order to count people. And so the fact that the census data has been delayed in delivery this year has caused a lot of sort of consternation about this and the preliminary data that's been provided has not like it's accurate at the state level to the census, but it means that the data that's been used to draw these preliminary maps is approximate. It's been, it's been sort of approximated to with good tools and to the best degree of accuracy that the staff is has been able to. We can't be sure that the preliminary districts, even though they have equal population in the preliminary data, it's highly unlikely that they will have equal population in the census data and so we know that the districts are going to need to change in order to meet that criteria criteria. Okay, so another really important criterion, as we saw, is the Voting Rights Act. And so just to get a little focus on this just a little bit for a moment. One of the things that the Voting Rights Act requires is that back drawers create opportunity districts, if the three jingles criteria are met. And these are sort of surprisingly interesting surprisingly but like they're really sort of technical criteria. First, the language or minority group which may be the which may require an opportunity district. Let's be shown to be sufficiently numerous and compact to form a majority in a single member district. So the idea here is that you want to give racial and language minorities the chance to the opportunity to elect a candidate of choice. So you shouldn't carve up a community in order to prevent that from happening and if you can allow that community to have the opportunity to let the candidate of their choice then should make that possible. So you have to show that that's possible. First, or if you can demonstrate that it's possible that's the first of the jingles criteria. Second, you need to show that the majority group is politically cohesive, meaning that those members tend to vote together, and that the majority votes as a block in a sufficient way that would enable the majority to defeat the minorities preferred candidate. So the idea here is that they often call this racially polarized voting in the case of a racial group, you need to show that people in the group tend to vote together and people outside the group could vote enough as a block in order to defeat that group's wishes. So these three criteria are really important and they also require a great deal of really good data in order to be sure that you're meeting these criteria when necessary. You need to know the demographics of the state on a pretty fine grained level, and you know a lot of information about how people vote. Since you will, since the vote is anonymous, and you'll never know how people as individuals vote, then you are going to need to have like some statistical methods to demonstrate that people within the group are voting in a certain way with some certainty, and the people outside the group are voting in a different way. Okay, so that was a lot but you can start to see how these get really complicated to understand to like work with carefully even though the big ideas are easy to understand. Okay, so see some of my pages aren't turning. Okay, so just to say a little bit more communities of interest. So we want to not split communities of interest and of course these political subdivisions, but to focus on communities of interest for a moment, a moment. How do we find these communities, what we need to ask people they come from people telling you know what their communities are. And then the question of how to prioritize these communities of interest is a very difficult one and that's one of the reasons why this is the deeply human process and why we need a balanced group of humans thinking carefully about it in order to make fair maps. And of course there's the issue that communities of interest might conflict with one another. And so you can't possibly honor all communities of interest without some magic of some kind. And as far as the political subdivisions though these are a little more cut and dried, but even these sometimes need to be split. So I live in El Paso County, and they, the estimate this year is that El Paso County is too big for a single congressional district so they're going to have to cut a piece of it somewhere. Okay, so you're getting the idea these are complicated compactness is enough is also complicated. You can sometimes identify visually that something is not compact, but how do you really measure that to make that decision and tell map drives what they should be shooting for. There's a lot of different ideas and they all have kind of good and bad aspects to them. It's just a little more complicated than you might think immediately. Competitiveness is extremely complicated because the definition of competitiveness that is in amendment Y and Z is that a district is considered competitive. If it has a reasonable likelihood of changing hands between decennial censuses. Well, that's a, you know, something that we can sort of think about intuitively and it makes sense, but how you actually decide if a district is has a reasonable probability of changing hands. You sort of be the magic magic again for that a crystal ball. Of course, you can use voting data or party registration data or other sort of evidence based methods, but you still have to make a lot of decisions about how you're going to define something like this. So it's pretty intense. Finally, there's the question of how do you avoid partisan bias will create some of those changes are structural right we've created a structure that should keep one party from dominating and making decisions that just work for them. But then if we actually want to consider the maps and look at, you know, those objectively and say, do they display partisan bias. Well, there's a lot of different ways to think about that. Should we shoot for proportionality, where the percentage of seats that a party gets in a legislature or in Congress should be in proportion with the number of votes that they got with the percentage of votes that the party got. So that seems kind of natural but that's in some ways very unlikely to happen for many states based on the way that people live. Should we use statistical tools like the one I'm going to describe later if we have some time. There's a lot of difficult questions when it comes to assessing partisan bias. So that's a lot of fairness criteria. I just put a lot of criteria out there for you. Let's talk briefly about the process that we'll see how are these maps going to be made and selected. Okay, so the commissions have been drafted and they've been meeting and taking input. So now the non partisan staff has created a preliminary redistricting map using preliminary data, which took into account some input from the commissioners and public comments while developing the map. Okay, so this is the first shot they're just trying to do things. These do not maximize competitiveness at this moment because we don't have a working definition of competitiveness from the commissions just yet. So that these maps are not yet designed to maximize competitiveness but the next round should be. So then after these maps are put out there which now they happen members of the public can share redistricting maps. Sorry, this could have happened at any time you could have shared a redistricting map that you thought was fair and present comments to the commissions through their website. Okay, so then there's a whole time of public hearings which is what we're going through right now and it's coming up in Boulder and in Longmont next week. There's three public hearings in each current congressional district for a total of at least 21. There's really more like 30 on the books right now. Most of them are joint commissions where they have both the congressional and the legislative commissions together, but some of them are only congressional commissions are only legislative. So for example there was one in El Paso County today that was just the congressional commissioners. In the meetings there's need to be at least 10 commissioners attending, and they'll be there in personal electronically, and the commissions of broadcast online I attended mine online today it's very exciting. And you can on the commission on the website, you can submit comments, if you can't make it to the hearings, and also those maps that you could create on your. One of the really interesting things you can do here is actually go see all the comments that anyone has submitted. They're all published on the website and you can really read who is speaking up and maybe whose voices aren't being heard there. So it's a really interesting thing to look at the website and see all the comments. So after this whole process, then the commission will take all this input and pass on to the staff, what are important concerns and then the staff will prepare, prepare another map. Okay, trying to answer each of those concerns. So the commission will sort of think about this map and they'll can be more public hearings. A commissioner can request that the staff prepare more maps if they don't like the maps or make changes to the next map and the staff is gone. And if they like these maps the commission can adopt a final map after the, the first step map presented. So finally when the commission agrees on a final map they need to send it to the Colorado Supreme Court. And to agree, they're going to need eight of the 12 commissioners to say yes, and then needs to include at least two unaffiliated commissioners. So it can't just be one party or any two parties. It has to include the unaffiliated commissioners as well. Okay so if this doesn't work after all of this then a staff map will be submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court and then they will review and decide if it meets the requirements in the Constitution. So it's a long process and there's been deadlines in the Constitution but of course these have been changing a bit as time goes on because of the delayed census data. Okay so how that brings me to the census data. As I mentioned, having equal population really requires counting people at a very fine grained level. And of course we need as I mentioned also that we need this accurate demographic data to make sure that the voting rights act is being enforced. So just to give you a quick picture of the what's going on here. So if you look at the you know imagine California here that's a state at this time data from the Census Bureau has been released it tells us the total population of every state. Okay so we know how many people live in each state and that was what they needed to do to pass out the seats fairly. So they take each state and break it down into counties and then census tracks and block groups and finally blocks, which are essentially like a city block in an urban center in general. And so this is the fine grain of data that we need to draw the maps. This is the site grain of data that we have currently. So the non person staff had used really all the resources they could get their hands on from the state demography office to try and estimate the block level population. But this is certainly not going to match the census data so we're going to see big changes. So I noticed in the chat that we have. I say that it's going to be available August 16 but yes there's been an update that in fact this should be August 12 so it's coming so soon. We're going to see what this data looks like and we'll have a lot better idea then of what kind of profound effect in my catalog maps. Okay so without further ado, let's talk about the, let's talk about the maps. So these maps that the graphics that I have here and almost everything I'm going to show you for the rest of this talk, or for the next five minutes say at least will be available on the redistricting website. So this is redistricting dot Colorado dot gov and I'll have that featured many times in the slides. This is a really great source for information about the redistricting process they've managed to do a great job with it. So I see that there was a question about, is there a document where the public can read the rationale behind the district game. So there is not one where they explain why they drew every line exactly the way they did, but a great starting point is available on that website they have a memo that comes out with each of the maps that is the congressional map the state legislative map. Excuse me the state house map and the state senate map, where they talk about the decisions that they made so they don't explain every single division. It's true. It's a great place to start. Okay, so here's the new preliminary congressional map. So some of the big changes, of course, I've said many times this is definitely going to change at least slightly to get equal population. One of the big changes is that there's a new district, which they're calling the new one, this purple one up here, district eight, really in some ways, as soon as you draw, like redraw the boundaries everything becomes a new congressional district because the every district when we redistrict. So the, even though we have more districts, the population has grown so much that we in fact have more people in each district as well. So the ideal population for each district is, you know, about 3000 people more than it was at the last time. So you don't even have more districts you don't get to have fewer people for this. In the drawing this they tried to keep counties together as much as possible but also cities and some communities of interest that they had information about the did manage to not split any county the population below 300,000 so that was, that was a good effort. There was a historic Hispanic community of interest in that was as well documented, connecting Pablo with the San Luis Valley, and it was important to map cars to keep that together and so that was previously on the western slope. It's now being counted as part of the eastern plans. That's one of the major changes. There's a lot of other changes will focus a little bit on congressional district to now. So, what are these two pictures, well, let's start with the one on the right, even though that is not a logical way to read but forgive me. So what you see here are the colors indicating the new congressional districts. Okay, so District two contains a lot of Boulder County. And you, I didn't go all the way the way I'm in border so it would have made it too small to read but the line space and the color basically just go north through the county from here. Okay, so the colors represent the current districts, the red lines represent the previous districts. So what we see is that Boulder County used to be contained in District two, along with these mountain communities and Jefferson County here and some other districts that were contained of room field and such, and Boulder County has District two has lost those mountain communities and lost room field but has gained long month. And so there, that's been a major change. So, Boulder County was also broken up here. You see that we've lost these mountain communities over here, including Netherlands to the western slope district. We're going to zoom in a little closer on what the boundaries look like that's what we see here on the right. So just focusing a little more tightly over here. Okay, so that was this that's those are the congressional districts, how about the state Senate. Well the state Senate has 35 seats in it and so the ideal population for each district is about 165,000. So we're allowed to have 5% deviation from the most populous to least populous district. And then we really use that deviation, and we see that deviation in these districts, we got 4.78% in this preliminary plan with the preliminary data. So, District 21 is the only majority Hispanic district in the state Senate if you look at the demographics which are available on the redistrict commissions website. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so those are those those districts. Okay, so now that you have another second to look at them let's focus in on Boulder County here. So in the state Senate, you can do the same outline as before the colors indicate the current districts and the red lines indicate the previous districts. So Boulder County ended up with, perhaps, more county preservation than before but maybe not maybe it's sort of a trade off. You can see that. Yeah, that we have had some major changes in districts over here. Okay, where Longmont is grouped with Firestone and Frederick. Boulder is now divided a little closer in here and a little further out over here. So there have been a few changes in the state Senate. Okay, State House has 65 seats and so that means you have about 89,000 people per seat. And then this again the, we have 5% wiggle room for the population, and they really use it here 4.99% in the preliminary now. So you can see the maps here. One map or one district that might look a little strange to you is this District 51 that takes in the San Luis Valley and then comes up here into Pueblo. And so you can see the detail of what it looks like in Pueblo on the bottom right here. This is an opportunity district that has historically been found to be possible and necessary for this region. So that's why one of the reasons it looks very non-compact is because the Voting Rights Amendment or the Voting Rights Act is about compactness and criteria. Okay, so there's some pictures of the whole state. What does it look like around Boulder? Well, we're seeing some major changes around Boulder County. So taking a look at what's happening. Again, the colors indicate the current, the new districts and the preliminary districts that is, if not, they're not accepted yet. And the red lines are the old boundaries. So you can see that almost all the districts have been significantly redrawn, which makes sense because there's been a huge amount of population growth in the last 10 years and so there were going to be some big changes. Okay, so that's just a preview of the maps. I would really encourage you to spend some more time with these on the website as I said. But this is a great time to get input on these maps and decide whether you like them, what things you think needs to be changed. One really important way that you can offer input is by defining your community of interest. In state law, it's defined to be any group that shares one or more substantial interests that could be the subject of legislative action. Okay, so it can't just be, you know, an interest that has no legislative possibilities. And it needs to be a group that has reasonably proximate population. So it shouldn't be scattered all over the state in a way that couldn't be built. Okay, so some examples would be public policy concerns, like an urban area, a rural area, something agricultural, industrial or trade. Public policy, other public policy concerns like education, employment, environment, water, transportation, and really the list goes on. This is not designed to be any sort of a complete list. It's a racial, ethnic, or language minority group, which is defined as in the Voting Rights Act. And so in some places those aren't called communities of interest, but in Colorado, under Colorado law, those are communities of interest to it. So it can't, however, be a relationship with a political party and incumbent or political candidate. So, Democrats are not a community of interest. People who are, you know, really like their current incumbent are not a community of interest and their concerns are sort of presented to the commission that way they can't be taken into account. So we're gathering this information constantly, and you can submit through the redistricting commission website or make a public comment in meetings. I watched a couple of people give public comment today. It was not that it didn't seem, I bet it was stressful, but it didn't seem to be like in any way a bad experience for those people and the commissioners were very interested. They had a lot of questions. So I thought it looked like a great, yeah, a great idea. Okay, so how can we get involved. Well, so go to those meetings. I see I put up the most, the ones that are coming up the soonest, the six and the seventh or tomorrow and Saturday. You can go to any of these hearings in Trinidad and Alamosa in Durango. Any of these are you don't have to just submit in your area you can go to any of these public hearings through the magic of the internet. Or if you just want to drive there you can certainly go in person. Okay, so you can go speak at any of these meetings, or if you just want to observe the process. It's really this whole point of this process is it is very transparent and so observers are welcome and encouraged. If you would like to have a formal process for observing and sharing the information that you observe the League of Women voters has created an observer core. If you're a lead member you can join the observer core on the LWV Colorado website that's posted here. If you'd like to make a map of your community of interest, you can do it on the online portal that's available on the redistricting website, or there are a couple of like easier to use portals like redistrictor.org and Dave's redistricting.org where you can create your community of interest draw it on a map and describe it, and then sort of save it and submit it to the commission through the website. Okay, so there's your meetings in Boulder and Longmont are coming up August 10th and 11th. But if you can't miss if you can't make it to those really go to any of the meetings. Okay, so I'm, I think I'm running low on time so maybe I won't talk too much about the math, math, but maybe I can just do a quick teaser here. As a final thought I just like to, I think the theme of this talk is really trying to talk about the different ways that we think about fairness. So like the different fairness criteria that are in the law, and how it can be complicated to try and meet all of those at once. So this is a graphic from the Washington Post that is often depicted as how to steal an election. So it really depicts how partisan gerrymandering can work. In this picture we've got 30 blue voters and 30 red voters, or 20 red voters. And the question is how can you divide this up into five districts. Well there's a lot of different ways. And we see three different ways here in the district sort of by color the compact districts and then what they're calling the gerrymandering districts here. So we can see that if you use the principles of cracking and packing, that is, giving yourself a safe majority in many districts and cracking the other parties voters into large but safe minorities in those districts. And then whenever you have to give up a district packing that district is full of the other parties voters as possible. So through cracking and packing we can see that even though red has the minority of the voters in this toy example, they can win a majority of the districts. Okay and that's their example of how partisan gerrymandering works which is a great example and a really nice idea. Okay but some of the ways that we've been thinking about fairness, we can see that if we only thought about compactness we might draw these districts right here, which would result in every single district being one by blue, because if we, you know, just blue has a slight slight majority in the state and so you can easily draw districts for this way of people living that just have a slight majority for blue, just like the whole state does. So with compact districts we ended up with an outcome that many people would find very unfair. Now when we look by district sorted by color, we see that here these districts are pretty fairly drawn they don't appear to be gerrymandered. And we have an outcome that is proportional to the way that people voted, which people often think is a pretty fair thing. But you'll notice that these districts are extremely non competitive. Right. What we have here is like 100% red or 100% blue districts. So this is a criteria that we're going to try and respect that is definitely not happening here. So by prioritizing any one of these of these criteria over the others, you can easily end up in a situation that somebody else would say was was very unfair. So I think that just asking people to think a little bit about what about the context of the state and think about the many different competing priorities can sort of help when you're trying to consider what would be a fair map. So I guess I'll stop here. Thanks so much for your time and attention. If you have questions about the mathematical aspects I have a few more slides that I'd be happy to show anyone who wants to know but I think I'll, I'll stop here for now. Yeah, thank you so much. This is really great so much information to take in. We've got quite a few questions in the chat and you can, I think you can see those two. One is read the one from David Klein and there are some others that are kind of more specific to Boulder County. The question is one comment I've heard is that state legislative districts create more of an urban rural divide rather than the current districts. How would we get data to evaluate how how true that is can you maybe shed some some light on that. I have an exam in this question myself. But if I were going to answer this question. What I do is in the census data, both in 2010 and in the current data that will be or the data that will be released in August 12 each census block has a classification as being like, you know, urban block or roadblock there's a lot of classifications and it's a little complicated so you probably want to do a little reading about what each of those definitions mean, but a sort of simple way to maybe start answering that question with data would just be to add up the rural and in the different districts that existed in 2000 from 2011, and the ones that are being proposed now, and just see which one has more like even balance there. So this is a really interesting question that sort of gets swept under the rug because we talked about like partisan gerrymandering, but there are a lot of other ways that people can find districts to be out of balance and that is that is one. I think that they have created more separate urban and rural districts out of a desire to respect communities of interest, because rural communities have really spoken up about wanting to be represented by rural representatives. So if you read through the comments that have appeared on the redistricting website. So far, rural communities have really made a good effort to get their voice heard. So if you see that that could be one reason why that's happening. Thank you that's really helpful and I think that really touches on an issue that I think a lot of people in Boulder County are really have questions about including Laurel, your question here in the chat. I have a couple more questions prior as league members prior to the event about Eastern Boulder County, kind of staying together versus Western Boulder County from Netherlands Ward, you know really being as at least in the current draft. They're being a part of another district they are rural, but a lot of people in those communities might say they have more of a community of interest, you know with with the rest of Boulder County so I wonder if you have some thoughts about, you know, again like if you happen to have any kind of analysis on on why that, you know if that's a situation that you were just addressing more urban versus rural or if you have some other and kind of intelligence or assess analysis to share with us on kind of why the preliminary map was drawn that way. Well so again I can't speak at all for the commissions I can speculate, maybe. And, again, just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of factors happening population balance is the number one. And it could be that they found that the mountain communities of Western Boulder County really seem to fit as a community of interest that are with the, with the mountain communities on the western slope. But they needed population balance, and it could be that having Gilpin County stay with Boulder made a lot more sense population wise, because you certainly could see why Gilpin County wouldn't want to be broken up. It's a small county with 6000 people in it and so it's sort of hard pressing, you'd be hard pressed to justify cutting a county of 6000 in order to keep a much larger county whole. It could be that there's some population balance issues there that made that a really natural fit. Again, getting down to one person equal population is quite difficult. And so there's a lot of trade offs that need to be made there. It's possible that that people had comments from citizens saying that they thought that Gilpin County should stay with Boulder, you know, like the bulk of Boulder County. I'm afraid about all of those comments on the website and read summaries of them in the memos that came out with these maps if you go to look at the website. But I, if that is something that people don't agree with, then this is a great thing to bring up at the hearings, and let them know that you really think that the western parts of Boulder County belong together more than Gilpin County and you may be able to talk to them about why those decisions were made at the hearings. Thanks. So for folks who are participating, please, if you do have questions for Beth, please feel free to put those in the chat. One thing I'll just ask, which is, you know, you mentioned at the beginning that how, how any of us identify as humans as part of a community. What our communities of interest are what all of our different personal identities are and kind of how we how we connect with each other now, they're so subjective. And I wonder if you have, you know, kind of any thoughts or guidance for how, you know, we can really kind of think and articulate what what those concerns we have are, you know how how can we best articulate those thoughts those connections things that we really want to relay to the commission and to other other Coloradans about these draft maps either in our written comments or by by participating in the hearings or for some other part of the process. Yeah, so really, that's a interesting and hard question that I feel like everyone will have slightly different answers to. I think that when I'm thinking about communities of interest. I started by thinking about what do I do every day. So, so on one level just thinking about what things happen in my daily life that are really important to me and where I would really like to have a say in what happens. And then around each of those sort of daily things I might think okay, what kinds of other people would share those interests with me. Are those interests that are geographically based. If so, then those might be good things to think about when you're trying to put together a community of interest. Let me back up for a second. You don't have to design one community of interest for you. A person might have many communities of interest. Right, there's not just one community that represents everything that's important to you. It's completely okay to have many different communities of interest and to talk about those separately and consider them as you know different examples of things that you think should be kept together. So really thinking about what occurs in your daily life that legislation could have an impact on can really be a great first step for brainstorming. And then I think on another level just thinking about what's important to you is education important to you. What kinds of educational institutions are do you think need to be grouped together. It could be schools it could be that you think it's really important to preserve your school district. It could be that you think it's important. It could be older to stay in a district with CSU, just as an example, as of a community of interest that was found to be very important in the previous redistricting round. So, thinking about the kind of like values that you have that could be affected by legislators and how those show up in the world around you, sort of starting with a brainstorm and then trying to get more specific from there I think could be a really good way to just begin that process. I mean, you can ask yourself, is it important that this is something a community that stays together to, because you may think of things that are important to you that don't in fact necessitate keeping the community together because there, there's sort of communities that are spread out all across the state in a way that doesn't really make sense to keep together. You know so trying to keep that in mind as you work to can sort of maybe clarify whether everything that's important you should be a community of interest, probably not but probably there are some that are. So, is it local is it is a big question you should ask yourself. Great. Thank you. There's a couple of other nuts and bolts questions I'd love to get in and then, and then we've got a math algorithm question for you. But first is a couple of nuts and bolts about kind of new draft maps and commenting. One is, after the new census data is incorporated will there be time to provide comments on the updated maps before they're approved. They are currently planning another round of hearings after the next map. So I don't know if they have the dates up on the website yet I didn't check that specific thing, but they're to my knowledge the S they're planning a round of districts, or a round of hearings and there will always be like the portal, the public comment portal on the website will be there for you. And I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, go ahead. Now go ahead. The first map is the first draft of a final map but it doesn't have to be the final map either they're like it can change and they will still be accepting these comments in various forms, including as I believe a round of hearings. Great I think you just answered another question about yeah that people can really provide comments in a bunch of different ways if they're not able to attend in person there's online news in that that sort of thing that's great thank you. Oh, may I just mention very quickly that there is there's a Spanish language portal. So they will accept comments in any language through the English portal. If you can get to that if you can navigate to that on the website you can enter your comments in any language and they will bring in a translator to translate those comments and take them into account. There is specifically a Spanish language portal for comments available on the website with the tab and everything in Spanish so it should be easy to navigate to. And so I don't let I would encourage people to not think of language as a barrier to this and make their voices heard. And perhaps if if they if anyone does experience language as a barrier to contact the commission directly. Yeah, so I would say yes, they would very they even though there may be challenges please. The Commission would very much like to help overcome those challenges, and so please do reach out to them. Great. Um, so then we've got a question how are census blocks determined. So the Census Bureau gathered, like, after they have looked at their initial population counts, they, every 10 years divide the state up into census blocks. And the idea is that in a in a city they're basically, you know, a city block, but in rural areas they're larger, just to sort of try and have sensible boundaries they'll try and use often natural boundaries of roads or rivers or resources out there to try and have still fairly small populations, but not so small that people become, you know, easily identifiable. So privacy is important in the census and that's actually a big issue this year they're using a different method for trying to keep people's data private called differential privacy. So census blocks are just determined by natural boundaries, and they're supposed to be big enough to give some baseline level of privacy so there are fewer, they're not blocks that commonly have, you know, a single person in them or something like that. Great thank you. A couple more questions Beth we've we've got a few more minutes yet if you're if you're okay. We'll go ahead. One question is our school districts, a community of interest. So school districts, you could think of them as a community of interest. They're also political subdivisions. And so you can sort of lobby to keep them whole as communities of interest and as political subdivisions which have equal weight. And so, so for example if you just think your county should be kept whole. That's for various reasons. You can think of that as a sort of community of interest but also as a political subdivision. So, I would say yes, and they are also covered in another part of the law. Thank you. Let's see. Another question about how best should we think about the 20 or more Democrat incumbents redistricted into districts with another current Democrat incumbent, more so than on the Republican side, can you again kind of share any thoughts or analysis on that. So, the non person staff is was legally not allowed to take preserving incumbents into account when they drew these maps. And so, I believe that it's very unlikely that they considered any information about incumbents when drawing this map. So, if the processes were followed correctly this is just the result of drawing lines without thinking about incumbents. Now that has, as you've mentioned here this has paired more Democratic incumbents and Republican incumbents. The fact that there are more Republican or Democratic representatives than there are Republican, and in the State House as well, makes it likely that more Democrats would be paired and so they're just the fact that there are more Democrats paired that Republicans doesn't make me suspicious in any way. I, I don't know what else to say about it, except for that. It's not legal within the amendments Y and Z to consider and come and see it all when drawing these maps. So, oops. Thank you. So another question about community of interest, can an industry like the ski industry in the ski kind of the mountain ski areas in our, in our region be considered a community of interest. So the industries. Yeah, so if you, if you look at the website it when you're either saying that you would like to have a time to comment online or if you show up in public and want to make a comment. They'll ask you for your name, and also for who you're representing like are you speaking on behalf of a organization or group. Anybody who would like to enter comment on the public portal can enter that comment. And there have been comments from chambers of commerce. There have been comments from county commissioners on behalf of their counties. So there's a wide range of comments there. Now, on behalf of a specific industry or business. I'm not really sure exactly how that, how the commissioners would look at that. I assume that the person making the comment could say that, you know, on behalf of their business, they believe this is a community of interest. But I, you know, I'm not a commissioner and so I wasn't trained on exactly the nuance of how they should interpret those, those comments. But you can use the portal and you have to give your personal identity, and your, your zip code. You can, you know, and you should speak transparently about who you're speaking on behalf of, but I don't think there's any, any. There's no like barrier to submitting those comments whether the commission will consider them with the same way as individual comments, I don't know. Great, thank you. Hopefully, Anna that helped answer your question as well. A couple of more questions. So there's one we'll get back to the mathematical algorithms and gerrymandering just a minute. One is I heard that six college campuses got split with the maps on house district preliminary maps how is that justified. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I might guess that they may be weren't looking at the college campus, they didn't have those up when they were doing the district thing and it wasn't something that they had as a as a layer and their mapping tool. I'm not really sure about that. I think it's possible that that they split college campuses without. Yeah, I don't necessarily want to speculate about exactly why that happened, but it's possible that on a college campus people only live in a certain part of it and so it's possible that like the population on the college campus like the dorms work split. But the line ended up getting drawn through the sort of non populated part of the campus. That's just a total speculation I have no idea. But that does seem a little weird doesn't it and I don't I don't know why that is certainly seems like a community of interest. It does and if that's happening in your local college I think that would be a great thing to talk to people about at the at the Commission hearings. So last question and then after you address this one, Mandy will show just a couple of slides, just kind of summary slides so people have them as part of the deck again about kind of what the process is moving forward how people can engage. And the last question is, are there algorithms that could prove gerrymandering. Wow, it's like somebody set me up for that question. So, a lot of the mathematical work that I do with my team, one of the members of which is here right now, Dr. Jen Clelland who's a member of legal movement voters Boulder County is in working with mathematical tools to select to detect and hopefully prevent partisan bias in maps. So I can give you a little spiel about it if you like, but one of the big ideas for sort of preventing and detecting partisan gerrymandering these days is something called ensemble analysis. It's a really cool idea, you basically, you basically create data rich map of the state, and then use that to create millions of random valid redistricting plans that do not have partisan bias they don't use any partisan information whatever whatsoever, but they create plans where districts have equal population, you can do things like try and preserve counties and make reasonably compact districts like the law requires. You can create millions of possible plans like this, and then you use real voting data from an election like say the state treasure election or something like that to sort of figure out the partisan balance of each of those districts in each of those millions for plans. And so, by looking at a million different samples you can say well, in this first sample we had so say for congressional districts we had three Democrats and five Republicans. And then in this next map we had like, you know, for democratic majority districts and for Republican districts. So you go through and do this for each of these million maps and sort of create a picture of how often different outcomes happen, basically make a bar chart of the number of times that you outcome happens and it makes this beautiful little belcher that kind of describes what's likely to happen for a state without partisan manipulation. And what this does it kind of gives you a context of what you could expect without partisan manipulation, and it gives you a way to sort of identify things that sort of fall outside of that normal range. Those extreme partisan gerrymanders show up as being very unlikely to occur without partisan bias. And so this tool has been really, really a big part of the recent conversation around redistricting a big part of the case, which are versus common cause, which of course, was not did not find that partisan gerrymandering was within the range of federal law, but also a big part of some other cases like the follow up that actually overturned those districts in North Carolina that were part of Richard versus common cause. This has been a very persuasive tool in courts, and in sort of the conversation about how we should look at fair redistricting lately. So if you want to know more about that I'm always happy to talk tons more about it. Dr. Clelland and I and our other collaborators have a paper out in the Journal of Computational Social Science where we use this tool on the districts, the current districts, the 2011 districts in Colorado so I'd be happy to share that with anyone who's interested. That's great for those who really want to get down in the weeds it's it's wonderful to know those resources are available and thank you so much. And to remind people that no one need be a mathematician in order to really look at these maps, get involved, you know read the information, all of that so. Thank you so much for the presentation. I learned a lot. I know other folks did too. Thank you for answering such a wide range of questions. On behalf of the league then we just want to just quickly share this information that that Mandy is posting about where the two hearings taking place in Boulder County are going to be next week. But again, as you've reminded us back there are multiple ways that people can participate if not in person. Mandy has reminded us in the chat that it is really important that if you want to testify remotely, you must register in advance so hopefully folks who are really interested can check schedules and go ahead and take, take care of that. And then just kind of the public guidelines guidelines for public hearings here on the screen now also information that's on that redistricting website that Mandy's posted. Thanks very much for having me Elizabeth and thank you Mandy thanks to everyone who's here tonight. Have a wonderful night. Thank you so very much. Hope everyone has a really great evening. On behalf of all of us at the League of Women Voters of Boulder County. Your participation shows you're interested in in in this process. And if you're interested in joining us and helping host more educational events like this. I'm either getting down in the weeds just encouraging other people to participate. We'd be happy to have you. That's thanks and everyone hope everyone has a great evening.