 We're really pleased to have an event long in the making about really the issue of seeing a lot of the efforts to pare back American democracy, make it harder for people to vote, turn back restrictions on money and politics, turn back other efforts to organize citizens, see them as part of a cohesive story and think of it that way rather than the issue by issue way we often think about and I think these efforts are inseparable from our thinking about effective government and people's ability to make change. The story of this event is that many months ago, Nick and I heard of the organization in every voice called me and said, you know, there's a great report coming out and it really looks at some of these issues and maybe we could get a big discussion of that going and I said that would be great and then I also saw that there was a book by Zach Roth on a similar topic and maybe we can get these two perspectives together and then get some other angles that can help us see how these practices work out in real life. So I'll just quickly introduce the panel, turn it over to Nick, we'll have some discussion up here, the two presenters and then we'll open it up to a broader conversation. Nick Cool opened us off is the president and CEO of every voice center. He and I have worked together for many, many years on issues of campaign reform and small donor public financing and clean elections public financing and it's a long history in that field. The author of the report, Democracy to Crossroads is Tova Wang. Tova is the director of policy and research at the Center for Secure and Modern Elections. She has 20 years of experience working on election practices. She was a staffer of the election, what was it called, the election, what's the name of it? We don't talk about that anymore, okay, that's why it's not here, that's why I haven't bought it. Carter Ford Commission, maybe? I should stick with it, I should stick with it. We won't talk about that, but she's been doing really path breaking work on voter participation and election administration for many years and she's the author of the book, The Politics of Voter Suppression that came out in 2012. The author, I can't hold up the book, but Zach Roth is the author of The Great Suppression which just came, Great Suppression, Voting Rights, Corporate Cash and the Conservative Assault on Democracy which just came out, got a great review in the New York Times and really covers a lot of the same territory with a lot of really rich color. Depending on these and bringing some of their own experience, Anna Berger retired in 2010 as a top ranking officer at the Service Employees International Union and the first chair of the Labor Federation changed to win. She served on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and leads a project at Cornell that brings together multi-stakeholders in the global supply chain around sustainable business models. She's also involved in the Gettysburg Project which is focused on improving civic participation. We're also pleased to have Marcia Johnson Blanco, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers Committee. She manages the project's portfolios that include election protection and the largest nonpartisan voter protection program promoting election reform and seeking to improve full participation. So with that I'm going to turn over to Nick, get this going and look forward to a great discussion. Thanks. So good afternoon and thank you, Mark, and thank you, New America, for hosting this. Thank you, panelists and thank you, audience. So as Mark said, I'm the head of the Every Voice Center which some of you may know as public campaign from years past. We work with local, state, and national activists to win campaign finance systems that allow candidates to rely entirely on small donations augmented by money from a public fund. We changed our name to Every Voice a couple years ago because we wanted to underscore the core values that animate our work, equality, and participation. And frankly it also tests pretty well. We have yet to find someone to say, I don't want my voice heard. That's just not something you hear people say. That tagline, though, is important and the values that underline it are important. And they're important for this conversation because they apply to many of the issues that Tova, Zach, Marcia, and Anna are going to talk about today. And to me, that underlying common ground also across these different issues also leads to two really important questions. As we look across all these different attacks on democracy, and Zach, I think you've catalogued a total of six, but they're broken down into some subsets too. So it is just sort of a panoramic look at attacks on democracy. The question is, is there a consequence far greater than any of these single battles? Is there a whole problem greater than the sum of each particular threat to democracy just taken alone? And the second question, I think, is what is there to be gained in a common analysis, a joint strategy, and direct coordination on fighting back across these different silos? On the first, I would just say quickly that I think the current presidential campaign is an example of what happens when the public at large feels, for good reason, that it has very little agency at all within the political process. And on the second question of fighting back together, I think we're just the beginning of learning the answers to this. With democracy itself, perhaps seen as the first time as sort of a connective tissue for organizing. The Crossroads report, which Tova is going to speak about, she wrote it along with every voice and common cause staff. It was sponsored by the Democracy Initiative, a relatively new and still evolving national consortium of roughly 60 different organizations. Some are mass-based constituency organizations, and others are voting rights and campaign finance reform policy groups. The collaboration itself works on campaign finance, voting rights, and Senate rules reform. So I think we'll see in the field how working together goes. We're also seeing some new experiments at the state level. I was out in Seattle this summer speaking with people who had helped win their new system of democracy vouchers, a campaign finance reform. Beginning in 2017, that system is going to send every single voter, eligible voter in the city, $100 worth of democracy vouchers, public financing. They can only be given and redeemed to and by candidates who have agreed to take only small contributions for their campaigns. So it's a big, new, exciting policy venture. But what's most fascinating to me in talking with the local activists who are moving it forward is that they said, you know, this fits much better with our voting work, registering new voters and then mobilizing those voters and saying voting is really important. And they put it, they said we put it in our voting rights box, not in our campaign finance box. And I thought that was really interesting. Now these same activists working through a larger coalition, the Win-Win Coalition, are looking at establishing a statewide democracy hub to network and integrate strategies across different specific democracy issues. I also want to mention Kathy Duvall who's here. She helped launch the Democracy Initiative and she's now working on a new national initiative called the Redistricting Reform Project. And she's looking where redistricting fits, going on offense and fighting proactively for good redistricting, where that fits on this emerging democracy map together with the other issues. So it is pioneering work that people are doing in the field and I think we're going to learn a lot in the next few years. But now I want to turn over to the panel and we're going to start with Tova. Mark, I messed things up if I go to the podium. So I don't usually ever do this, but since I have notes, the only way you can think that I don't have notes is if I go behind the podium, rather than sitting there, which might make me look a little foolish before I've even started. So my name is Tova Wang. I am currently the Director of Policy and Research at a new organization called the Very Poll Tested Center for Secure and Modern Elections, where I am working on a range of sort of more pro-voter initiatives, which is a nice change from being on defense, as well as doing research on people who are completely not engaged at all in the system. I'm also a senior fellow at Demos and I was the Director of Democracy Programs at CWA at the time that we wrote this report. So as you can tell from what's been said already, most of my work has been focused on voting and elections and I have been doing that for many years. But I have come to realize that the problems in our democracy certainly are wider and deeper than just the issues of voting as important as that is. And that's the new framework of looking at this that I'm going to be talking about when I talk about the report. So basically, the gist of it is that the takeover of our democracy is happening in a comprehensive fashion. It's not issue by issue. The attacks on workers and unions and the right to organize voting rights, not allowing there to be any restraints on money in politics or this completely toxic system, they're all inextricably linked. They're all part of a program that is really being driven by political and corporate elites to hold on to their power at the expense of the rest of the American citizens and others. So the point is that reducing the voices of unions and working people, taking away the right to vote, allowing the domination of money from big corporations and very wealthy people to take over our political system. They're not separate. They work together. And this means for people who care about democracy, we have to also look at them holistically and work on them holistically if we're not to end up in what some academics have called the possibility of a plutocracy or some argue that we're already in one. So this diminution of representative democracy is obviously important in itself, but it's also important because we will never be able to establish goals that I think a lot of people in this room would like to see on the environment, on corporate regulation, gun control, any range of issues because we know actually from intense research at this point that wealthy people and people who are behind big corporate interests fundamentally have different views on actual policy, fundamental policy issues like the ones that I just mentioned. And the report also expresses the belief that people who are trying to orchestrate all of this really, whether it's winningly or not, have a sort of world view or a view of the politics of our country that is exclusionary that doesn't see there being a big problem with elites sort of running the show. The view expressed in the report is one of inclusion and a country where people's voices are equal and everyone is heard including workers in the workplace and in the public square. So we have these two competing visions and we have to, I think, people who believe in the inclusion principle as I term it in the book that I wrote then we have to work the same way and work on these things collectively. So I'm going to just sort of run through the report a little bit. So what we can see the way that we sort of frame it in the report is if you can think of it as a grid. So you have the lines going across that demonstrate the different areas of democracy that are under attack in a coordinated fashion and then there's the vertical lines and the vertical line is the different levels of government in which these attacks are taking place. So what you see is the democracy issues that I've been talking about, but also the fact that they are under attack all three of them at the state level through state legislatures and governors at the federal level in terms of Congress and the federal agencies they control and also at the Supreme Court especially until recently where it's a little bit more up in the air but the cases of recent times have been also in the very anti-democratic mode. So if you start with prong one which is voter disenfranchisement and you start with the lowest level across you have the states. Now on the voting rights stuff there are plenty of people here I think who will talk about it so I'm not going to talk too much about it but most people here will know about all the attacks on voting rights in the states that have been taking place especially since 2010 and then even more since 2013 when we had the Shelby decision and we have you know they were all measures we all kind of heard this probably before they were all measures disenfranchised African-Americans, Latinos, young people etc. There have been a few notable successes recently in the courts on this and I would absolutely acknowledge but as we've been able to tell if you've seen in the papers the local officials and even the state officials are still trying to like try and find ways to evade these court decisions and still try to disenfranchise people without the benefit of having the Shelby decision to help us. One area I would point out where we have not been terribly successful in the courts or otherwise is in the issue of the disenfranchisement you may know about the case in Virginia where the governor tried to issue an executive order providing voting rights for people with felony convictions upon release from prison and the Republicans in that state have sued him and blocked that and I would also note that there is right now an initiative on the ballot, well they're trying to get an initiative on the ballot in Florida to do something about the 2 million people in that state who are disenfranchised currently because at one point in time they committed a felony so the other part of the horizontal grid of this is campaign finance you hear a little bit less about campaign finance in the states because of the horribleness of the Supreme Court on this issue but it's in the states also where you have state actors passing laws at the behest of corporate interest in the state getting rid of public financing increasing the limits on contributions we see from this that in 24 states campaign laws, finance laws have been weakened in some way or another in recent years such as increasing contribution limits and I'll ask Nick to comment on the campaign finance stuff at some point if it becomes, if you have anything that you want to chime in with he's the expert on that, not me so then the third prong at the state level again so we have this grid is going after workers and unions and this is kind of interesting for me at least because well I married into the labor movement but I've always been a strong supporter of unions and I really do see the attacks on unions and worker rights as part of the anti-democracy agenda it is, unions are the voice of a huge number of working people and they operate their political activities through small voluntarily donated small voluntarily collected donations to unite around certain values so this works very much in my view in tandem with voter disenfranchisement and the flooding of our politics with some big money we see this especially with the right to work laws they have great ways of phrasing these things and I take the labor movement still hasn't come up with a good phrase to use instead of right to work but you see that happening at the state level right to work laws being passed all over the country really picking up in the last few years which allows people who benefit from collective bargaining for better pay benefits all that kind of stuff to not pay into union dues and basically at a certain point the logical conclusion is to destroy unions all together and again this has been happening in the states for example in Michigan they passed it in 2012 the person behind it almost single-handedly was the owner of Amway Richard Davos who got himself his allies and the legislators who are beholden to him to get this passed so just as an example it will probably not surprise you to know that Wisconsin has achieved the trifecta they have since our friend Governor Walker was elected they have enacted a strict IB law and broken up what had been the hugely respected election commission in that state they ended the public financing system and increased contribution limits and passed right to work legislation in 2015 so that's been a real hotspot for this stuff and then we get to the next level which is Congress and federal agencies again on the voting stuff I'm going to leave it mostly to Marcia but I hope I know that she'll talk about in light of the Shelby decision which really gutted the Voting Rights Act there have been huge efforts to introduce it at least just get a hearing on legislation that would address that ruling and bring protection to voting rights again and the chairman of the committee that oversees that has refused to even allow there to be a hearing to hear about whether there are still problems in our voting process racial discrimination in the voting process we also see in Washington Congress going after labor the Employee Free Choice Act is a perfect example and it actually is an example of big money coming together with anti-union forces as the Chamber of Commerce spent over 200 million dollars attacking the law that would have made it easier to form a union even though the bill had the support in the house and had President Obama support it was filibustered another arguably very anti-democratic practice the way it's done now and also throughout the Obama Administration members of Congress have gone after the National Labor Relations Board when it's been ruling ways they don't like Congress has also been complicit of course in increasing problem of money in politics not only by taking advantage of it but actually using legislation and actually an omnibus budget bill last year to double the amount that people could give to a political party and probably people know about the FEC I did not know this but apparently it's referred to commonly as the Failure to Enforce Commission it is on purpose one of the most dysfunctional agencies if not the most dysfunctional agency in our federal system and I also want to note the racial bias that's implicit in what's happening in the post-citizens united world that according to an every voice report donors from the upper east and upper west sides of Central Park gave more to presidential candidates than all 1200 majority African-American neighborhoods in the country so that tells you something and then finally the last political battlefield and I'm sorry that is a political battlefield but that's the supreme court there have been studies that demonstrate that the current supreme court especially when Justice Alito was still on it was the most conservative pro-business court in since World War II and Alito and Roberts were ranked number one and two in the pro-business category but it's not only that they have been ruled in an anti-democratic manner again in all three of these areas in terms of voting disenfranchisement again the interesting thing that I will point out is that there was a time in the 60s and 70s where this supreme court really saw itself as a defender of voting rights and did not just defer to state legislatures but actually looked at the racial and other kinds of injustices happening in the voting rights system and erred on the side of blocking restrictions and it's sort of been upside down the last several years where there's been this huge difference to state legislatures by the supreme court that has had a terrible effect on voting rights in this country and the supreme court has also been incredibly hostile to unions the first amendment apparently depends on whether you're a worker or you're a corporation as to how it should be interpreted we sort of dodged a bullet with the Friedrich's case having arrived in the supreme court right at the death of President Alito and maybe dodging a bullet was not a good analogy but there you have it but they are teeing up the next case to try and really basically completely destroy the unions through fair share provisions and then of course the most known is how the supreme court has created money in politics just completely opened up the floodgates it's not just Citizens United as Nick will tell you about in length if you get them to which is not hard there are several cases leading up to you and since Citizens United I have just like blown the lid off of any limits on campaign contributions you know it's been billions of dollars over the last few years I'm sure every voice will be coming out with a report in weeks telling us the incredible amount of independent money, dark money and perfectly legal money that's been spent on this so just to end I will sum up by again going back to this idea of a grid and the fact that all of these different issues across the board are linked together in terms of trying to use silence or at least mute the voices of ordinary Americans to the benefit of political and corporate elites and that it's also happening at all three levels of government and that we cannot see these issues as entirely distinct but need to see them holistically and together and work on them collectively as I think the people who don't share this vision of democracy have been doing for several years now I think we have copies of the report it's online also so I hope you actually will I'm told that this might be the crowd for the report so I would encourage you to do so and it really goes into detail in the way this is all kind of working together thanks for your time good, yeah not everybody has to but first of all thanks so much Mark and New America and Nick and every voice for putting this on I want to sort of build on what Tova was talking about and I want to do three things first, very quickly lay out the various four or five prongs of what I see as a kind of multi-pronged multifaceted assault on democracy that we've seen in recent years very quickly then kind of drill down on one of those prongs just because I think it's a little bit more under the radar and then kind of bring things together and talk a little bit about what I think is driving this beyond the sort of obvious partisan and kind of power motivations the book talks about restrictions on voting rights which I think all of you probably know pretty well as Tova was talking about began well in the last decade but sort of gained force in 2011 when a whole slew of republican governments came to power in a number of states across the country then gained more force after 2013 and in the Supreme Court we can the Voting Rights Act the move by the Supreme Court to kind of gut campaign finance laws which has made it easier for the wealthy and corporations to wield more influence in elections the gerrymandering of congressional districts which has given a boost to republican candidates such that after the 2012 election what more voters actually voted for democrats in congressional elections in the Republican House anyway the move in conservative legal circles which Tova kind of briefly alluded to to a movement called judicial engagement where for years, decades conservatives had talked about activist judges and judges who were striking down the will of the people as expressed through the democratic process lately the shoe is on the other foot where there's a move from conservative lawyers and activists to urge judges to actually be less deferential to the democratic process and more willing to strike down laws that they in their judgment believe violate the Constitution the Obamacare case, the 2012 one being the main example of that where you almost got five justices willing to sign on to that proposition in fact you did get John Roberts kind of endorsing that idea but he backed out of it by re-categorizing as a tax so just to say it's an ideology that appears to be close to achieving a majority on the Supreme Court so that's the kind of various prongs but another one that I think has flown more under the radar has to do with local government and local democracy and I want to start with a guy named Victor Crawford who was a tobacco lobbyist in 1995 he was dying of throat cancer after having been a smoker all his life and in order to kind of make amends for his career as a tobacco lobbyist he gave a very candid interview to the Journal of the American Medical Association and he talked about his lobbying work and he said you know me and my tobacco industry lobbyist we always wanted to move the fight to the state level or the federal level because that was where we were strong that was where we had influence the anti-smoking activists always wanted to move it to the local level because that was where they were strong they often knew the mayor or the council members they had personal relationships with the decision makers so we could never beat them on the local level he said and that sort of hits on an important truth about democracy today which is that local government, local democracy is in many ways the last place where democracy still works reasonably well where a sort of motivated group of citizens can come together and make change and so in part as a result of that we've seen since 2010 2011 progressive cities emerging as a place, as a sort of center for a very ambitious progressive legislation on the minimum wage on other economic issues, on the environment and now in response to that we're seeing conservative led states launching a very direct assault on local democracy by passing laws that sort of limit the sphere of local government and make it harder for cities and local governments to pass these progressive laws in the book I write about what happened in Denton, Texas which is a city about 40 miles north of Dallas where a group of citizens decided they had enough of fracking in Denton there was about 200 fracking wells within the city limits and they organized and got a ballot initiative on the ballot and they went out and knocked on doors and convinced their neighbors to vote for this ban on fracking and it passed overwhelming 58% of the vote and it was a great kind of victory for local organizing and grassroots democracy immediately the oil and gas industry pressured its allies in the Texas legislature and obviously the oil and gas industry has quite a few allies in the Texas legislature to find a way to undo this ban and so Texas ended up passing a law that barred local governments and this is Texas by the way where there's a long and kind of noble tradition of local control as you may know but barred local governments from regulating a whole range of oil and gas activities including fracking and it applied retroactively so just like that Denton's fracking ban was gone the main lobbyist or one of the chief lobbyists I'm sorry one of the main activists from Denton on the issue he said to me at first I was worried about fracking now I'm worried about democracy in Milwaukee voters similarly got a ballot initiative on a ballot to require businesses to provide paid sick leave for employees in 2008 it passed overwhelmingly a whole inspiring kind of grassroots campaign with local organizations supporting it when Scott Walker and his Republican allies came in in 2011 they passed a statewide ban on requiring employers to do that so that's total talk about the trifecta in Wisconsin that's the quad whatever is the word for four of that in Birmingham, Alabama last year they raised the minimum wage and that was going to help mostly low income African-American fast food workers Alabama has no state minimum wage it was going to go up from the federal minimum to 25 an hour a few days before it went into effect the state lawmakers passed a ban on local governments raising the minimum wage in Alabama so got rid of their raise just like that the reason I see this as part of the larger story of these assaults on democracy that Tova was talking about and that we're all here to talk about is in part because there are ways for people behind these campaigns to hold on to as much political power as possible by kind of stymying the will of ordinary people the will of the majority at a time when thanks to demographic changes and thanks to other kind of ideological changes these people are increasingly finding themselves outnumbered especially on a national level and especially when everybody votes and it's been the last few years the Obama era really that's kind of I think made that clear to them where Obama twice won election by mobilizing previously kind of marginalized groups of voters racial minorities, the poor, the young and it also became clear that voters were more polarized and more there were fewer swing voters and so increasingly I think the people behind this campaign began to realize we're on the losing end of things and everybody is empowered and we need to find ways to maintain our hold on power while that's going on there's something else I want to get into quickly about this too which is that what's driving this obviously it's largely partisan politics or kind of power politics so making it harder for certain groups to vote benefits people who support policies on the other side same with weakening money in politics laws so these state preemption laws that make it harder past progressive legislation on the local level make it easier to achieve conservative policy ends that's pretty straightforward but I think we miss something if we don't also recognize that there's a very deep ideological element going on here which is and this is something that I try to which I write about in the book a kind of long standing and deeply rooted distrust of democracy on the part of some portion of Americans the idea that if we give power to ordinary people they're not informed enough to make wise decisions or they'll just vote themselves unlimited government benefits in a way that's economically unsustainable which was kind of what Mitt Romney was getting at in his 47% comments a little bit it wasn't just that these people are lazy moochers they're going to vote for President Obama no matter what they're being improperly bought in the book I try to trace this back all the way to the founders so Alexander Hamilton who's everybody's favorite guy lately in his one major speech at the constitutional convention he talked about the need to limit to write a constitution that would limit the power of ordinary people as much as possible and keep power in the hands of elites who he thought were sort of more suited to wield power he said the goal was to check the democracy and you can trace this all the way up to our own date now you see it sometimes even in the rhetoric of people pushing for these campaigns on voting restrictions and other parts of this anti-democracy assault so you see the veil slip a little bit sometimes when they forget they're supposed to be talking about voter fraud and instead they kind of let this on in the book I wrote about Ted Yoho who's a congressman from Florida in 2012 he talked about the danger of uninformed voters of people having the right to vote but not knowing how to use it properly he said you know you used to have to be a property owner to vote and everybody applauded at that he was at a kind of tea party meeting Steve King the congressman from Iowa has made a number of similar comments suggesting it might be wise to limit the franchise or at least discourage people from voting that's kind of a staple of conservative rhetoric lately I also write in the book about a campaign in Beaumont, Texas where a group of conservatives, white conservatives tried to use the Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act in 2013 when the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act to oust the local school board, the majority black school board and I was interviewing one of the leaders of this campaign over lunch and he said he wanted the state to just come in and seize control of the school board because he didn't like how they were running things and he said you know then we wouldn't even have to worry about elections at all so it's this kind of mindset I think that you can see pretty clearly coming out in some of these campaigns and it what it makes clear is that we like to think about democracy as a value that we all agree on across the political spectrum that we may argue very passionately about policy issues or even about values like individual liberty and the common good and so on but we all agree we all believe in democracy as the way to resolve these differences to me that's not necessarily the case democracy is a contested value and a contested policy on the ground in many ways just like these other issues and our consensus around democracy may in fact be a lot less firm than we like to think it is and just as a last thought this election season and some of what we're hearing on democracy issues in terms of voting and in terms of some other issues even in terms of kind of freedom of the press brings that out to me that democracy is still a contingent value that we keep having to fight for that's it, thank you I do have notes, you can see them anyway but anyway thank you for having us it was an incredible book it was an incredible report and after having listened to all this I could almost be depressed by what they've been able to accomplish and their strategies and so I want to touch on a couple of things because I'm actually very passionate about the sense of urgency for us to act and I think that when we think about urgency and acting how do we take ourselves out of the moment and think about where we have to go adding a few to the litany of crimes that have been committed against democracy but secondly I really want to talk a little bit about their conservative agenda that is really long term and strategic and people who believe in democracy which is often times the battle of the moment and then reacting to what they're doing and can we think about some of the bigger questions and bigger strategies that can get us to a better place in the long term because I think that as Nick said in the beginning about everybody does want to have their voice heard and when we put it in a different kind of a way maybe we can actually engage people who want to have their voices heard and have their voices heard for the common good not for the good of the 1% so that's why I wanted to talk a little bit about that today so first of all I was at SEIU as a secretary treasurer who drove the political and legislative and grassroots campaigns and also the chair of change to win and I retired in 2010 and that was a great kind of concern of the future of democracy one we had already felt within the labor movement the attacks of the conservatives on our institutions at that time it was some of the smaller things around total transparency on how we spent our money so that they could get ahead of us and increase litigation around any work that we did accusing us of violating federal laws and all that kind of stuff that was going on but we also were just seeing the attacks on Acorn and you know citizens united had been decided so in my mind it wasn't just that they wanted to be able to dump as much money as they could to flood us out and control democracy they wanted to take away any resources and power from organizations that engaged people around democracy so they took on Acorn an organization that was across the communities engaging people about issues at the local level the national level and the state level and the federal level in a way that to scandals and other things tried to strip them all away and then we saw there when we tried to pass the Employment Free Choice Act I spent a lot of time as chair of change to win and the secretary chair of the FAU out there trying to convince progressive organizational leaders people who believe in democracy of the urgency of the Employment Free Choice Act of the value of the labor movement in terms of what we had done historically in terms of funding civil rights movements and other movements and without our resources and advocacy on a wide range of issues we would be in a bigger trouble and I would say that with mixed results in terms of their urgency for us to adopt and push through the Employment Free Choice Act and then I was not I guess done by the fact that after the Employment Free Choice Act when we lost in that hopeful window of the early Obama years that the conservatives didn't say that well we have a better place like let it go let's turn up the heat to try to figure out as Toba said how to stir away any resources that unions have any credibility that unions have any reach that unions have because that was a I believe and I think that what you were saying was that it really is about stripping away the infrastructure of democracy and now in the most recent years we've seen what's happened with Planned Parenthood this is the fight about Planned Parenthood funding isn't just about abortion but about sex across our country in some of the poorest places around that actually provide a good service to people and engage them and women mostly who are members of an organization who care about things and can step up and so it is one more time trying to take on an organization that has an incredible reach engaging people around their rights that they're trying to destroy because they want people to have no access to organizational empowerment and so I would just say that there are a couple of other problems that provide the ones that were clearly talked about and I do believe as Zachary was saying that this is about an ideology that doesn't really value people and when I went left SEIU and changed the wind I ended up going to Harvard on a fellowship and created a project that's called the Gettysburg Project on Civic Engagement and it's called the Gettysburg Project not because it's Gettysburg but because of the address and the country of the people by the people and for the people and right now we don't have a country of the people by the people or for the people, certainly not for the people and how do we actually think about that and so we've come together at that project to bring together people who are involved in civic engagement in movement building from grassroots geographic to national all kinds of organizations that really believe in civic engagement and academics who study it to try to figure out what do we need to really do with one of the first convening and the reason that we continue to convene is because what movement leaders have said is that they have that democracy is under assault that they all recognize it that it's not going to take tinkering around in the edges to save it and that every single one of them said and we were also consumed with the battle of the day that we have no time to even learn about what we're doing and trying from each other or ourselves and no time to at all think about the future, what's happening and how do we plan for it in a different kind of a way and so I would say that one of the problems that we have is those folks who don't really care about democracy who are trying to figure out how to hold on to their power they know exactly what they're doing and it is all about power and we sometimes forget that it's really about power and that we don't think about how to take power from the long term as opposed to how to keep them getting more power tomorrow and so where is that space for us to really think about a long term agenda and as you pointed out there's been a long term agenda on their side where is ours and how do we think about that and so at Gettysburg we've been trying to do a couple different things one is to think about what are the levels of power and how do we actually think about our campaigns so it's not just about winning for the moment but we're actually changing the structures so that we're winning for the long term that's what they do that's why they're attacking voting rights but we're trying to figure out short term and we need to figure out how do we actually change it why don't we have a bigger goals and longer term goals in mind that we can actually strategize with and so we've also been doing a lot of work about what is the future we're not looking at crystal ball but we can actually do research around what are the big tectonic changes that are coming our way and what do they mean for democracy and how would we think about things that are worked differently if we were trying to harness them for our sake as opposed to let them be harnessed by the others for their sake and so as we looked at mega trends we looked at 19 tectonic changes that were having an impact on society and democracy an economy and everything else as well and we grouped them into demographic shifts social and cultural shifts science and technological developments economic shifts environmental dynamics and political dynamics so what does that all mean as our demographic change it's not just the rising people of color it's also that the aging population is different it's not going to just be baby boomers it's going to be different levels of people retiring with different levels of resource availability if you think about it they're saying we're going to probably live to be 100 I'm a baby boomer by the way we could easily live to be 100 so we're going to have two waves of senior citizens we're going to have all different waves of immigrants in the world community we're also depending on what happens with climate we're going to have climate migration that's going to move people within our own country into different places in our country how do we think about that in terms of democracy and what would that mean that we would need to do in our democratic processes so that people have a voice and everyone has a voice so that we can actually determine what's good for all of us if we don't even think about that how do we do it in a way that it doesn't end up having what some people do which is having issues with each other and having politics about hatred and figuring out how do we have some politics and policies around inclusion and solving the problems for everyone how do we think about social cultural shifts when now when more and more people no longer trust traditional organizations when they are more likely to get their information online and organize for the moment not forever and so there are those when people are no longer going to church but they're very spiritual in terms of how we organize and automation we can debate whether automation is going to have an impact or not hey there are robots all over the place and they're creating more of them and driverless cars what does that mean about a different kind of economy and what does that mean when there's less work and so I can go on and on but how do we as people who believe in democracy kind of step back and think about that and therefore what are the questions we need to ask about what we should be fighting for why aren't we fighting for mandatory voting and how do we put together a 20 year campaign to get there why aren't we thinking about participatory democracy or citizens voting tools and other things that we do not just in one little town but we try to figure out what is our long term what are our long term goals that would really ensure our democracy and ensure that every person's voice is heard and how do we ask those questions and then how do we make sure that we stick with it because I would say that they are the conservatives have been very good about sticking with it you know when the Koch brothers don't like Donald Trump they put their money into the senate races it's not as if they stop raising money I would say that in 2010 when some progressive funders were discouraged by the Obama Obama's administration not accomplishing much they sat on their money and they sat on their hands and we ended up with a republican congress and so my challenge for all of us is not just to accept that they've done all these things how do we challenge ourselves to get ahead of the curve to look at 30 years at and plan backwards it might change some of our strategies in terms of our everyday battles the battles that we're having today that might give us a deeper win a longer term win if we look at it that way so those are my few thoughts thank you Marcia well I really appreciate that this conversation is about how we can take the approach to address the issues that we care about and to as we're talking about having a voice in our democracy and what we're confronted with right now is how do you have that voice when it's being stifled by laws that make it harder for certain people to be able to vote when money is drowning out the voice the money of the few is drowning out the voices of the many and dealing with the impact that that is having on policy and so I'm in the voting space the vote is your voice that's the frame I'm starting from and with election protection that provides an opportunity for an organization like the Lawyers Committee to empower voters that's my theme theme this year one of the ways to fight back against all of the suppression we've been dealing with now for over 10 years and being on the defensive is we need to empower voters to fight back give them the tools that they need and we need to borrow the tenacity from our opposition I wanted to talk about today Texas I'm going to pick on Texas today I always have a state that is the poster child and I think Texas fits in with this discussion because Texas and those in Texas who've been trying to prevent certain people from being able to vote have been quite tenacious in how they've done it and the voter ID laws in Texas deserve to illustrate that so Texas passed its voter ID law in 2011 and back then it was a state that was subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act so any voting change had to be reviewed federally so they came to the DC district court and the court took a look at the law and we intervened to say yes and make sure you pay attention to these aspects of the law and who's keeping from voting and the court said this law is discriminatory you can't use it so it was not in effect during the 2012 election 2013 Supreme Court issues the Shelby County versus Holder decision and what that decision did was say the formula that determined which states were subject to federal review is unconstitutional and so all the states that before had to submit voting laws for review to ensure that they weren't keeping minorities specifically from being able to vote no longer had that obligation that same day Texas's now governor then attorney general said oh that law that the court found discriminatory we're going to implement it and what is that law so the voter ID law in Texas SB 14 says that you can only use certain state IDs or certain federal IDs in order to be able to vote so concealed gun carry permit yes state student, state university ID no so they were very precise about who they wanted to vote and who they wanted to keep from voting so there's another section of the voting rights act section 2 so we said okay we're going to come after this law under section 2 of the voting rights act which for the time being is still the law of the land and the difference between section 5 and section 2 is that section 5 you can't implement what is being reviewed section 2 you can't implement while it's being litigated and I'll pause here for and just point out why did we start a project like election protection because from a litigating group like lawyer's committee because we realized that litigation takes a long time it's very expensive and the bad law is often being in use while you're going through the litigation the appeals back and forth up and down the court but it's what we have this is what we have to use the trial court judge found that Texas's law was discriminatory impact, purpose and poll tax Texas appealed to the 5th circuit and that circuit refused to stay the law during the 2014 election so the law was in effect and what that meant was that the child as the child court found 600,000 registered voters registered voters did not have the ID that Texas now required in order for them to vote and so these people were effectively disfranchised as we're going through this litigation after now two courts have found that it's discriminatory but Texas had the right to appeal they did a panel of the 5th circuit said we're not sure about your analysis on intentional discrimination but we agree it has an intentional disparate impact a discriminatory impact on minority voters and so we find this law impermissible Texas said well that's this panel how about if we appeal to the entire 5th circuit and so they did the 5th circuit, the entire 5th circuit a majority ruled yes it has a discriminatory impact and again the analysis on purpose we put it back to the court but there's a presidential election coming up so since we agree that it has a discriminatory impact we order the parties in the litigation to come up with a remedy for this election so we negotiated with the state as a party in the litigation and we said okay here's what we want we want voters to be able to use a range of IDs including non photo IDs and okay we agree that they sign an affidavit saying there was a reasonable impediment for them getting the ID that you want them to have and they can vote a regular ballot yay victory however we now have the attorney general of Texas and the Harris County County clerk saying we are going to go after everybody who signs one of those affidavits so what does that mean if I don't have the ID and I'm not sure whether the affidavit applies to me or not I'm not going to go vote right so we said you can't say that to people you can't chill the vote like that we were educated we wrote to the state and the state actually said to us well we're now responsible for what the Harris County clerk said so now we're back in court can you just make it very clear what this affidavit means who it applies to and then the department of justice also filed a motion saying and court tell them as they agree to train their election officials and train their poll workers so that they know what IDs are allowed and so that the people without these limited form of IDs can vote a regular ballot that oral argument is coming up on Monday so I'm just talking about Texas as an example of the tenacity and I agree completely that we can't be short-sighted about what we want about a multi-decade approach to the democracy that we want as one of my favorite characters in literature Madai Moody said constant vigilance the other side is taking a long-term approach to what they want from our democracy and we need to say whose democracy is this this is democracy of the people the people's voices need to be heard and any time you try to strike back or strike down that voice we are not going to put up with it and we are willing to do what it takes and however long it takes to fight back I'll stop there Thank you Marcia this has all been fascinating I think we feel like in a way we think a lot about polarization of the political process and it's almost like we're now polarized not just along ideological lines but really along viewpoints about democracy itself and it gets reinforced just to get the conversation started I was really I loved Anna you know thinking about it in a long-term way and thinking about democracy in conjunction with the huge demographic and environmental and economic changes that we're going to go through and then of course Marcia you remind us as the important book do that it's really hard to focus on that you need to be in court Tuesday and you need to be in court again on Thursday it's happening here and it's happening here so I think that's a real struggle but to try to one way to think about long-term future is to pull back a little bit to the past and I think what I want to kind of have you comment on a little bit is this is not a make America great again kind of thing it's not like there's a perfect moment right and what's interesting to me is that a lot of things you know if you roll back to like the early 1990s, mid 1990s there were steps forward as well as steps backward and you know there's the voter act you know some of the campaign finance reform steps like North Carolina's public financing of judicial elections are in a historical sense relatively recent and obviously everything before the Voting Rights Act sort of doesn't count as democracy at all in a sense so I'm just wondering how you know how can we think about lessons of things that were positive steps towards democracy in the very you know not too long ago past and what are the lessons of those processes I mean we do have you know there's rollback of early voting but you know it's not that long ago that there was no early voting you know what are the lessons of some of those things in the recent past for thinking in the long term in the way that Anna wants to wants us to do I don't know I'm going to well think about it like when I was young in the 70s there was a program called the VISTA program right where the government paid I think it was like $10,000 a year and healthcare for young people to be engaged and organized nonprofit organizations and institutions and they were also able to be advocates and so there was a huge movement around community engagement community organizing welfare rights organizations and others that were really staffed by the government's resources to instill citizenship and it was the card at the beginning of the Carter administration but definitely the Reagan administration that stripped away most of the money importantly stripped away any right to have any advocacy and so what was very much an advocacy of people's voice became something that was so controlled and limited that it had no impact and so just from that kind of a decision so this was this a program that really kind of engaged people in America and all of a sudden they thought about it and saw it coming the opposite way and decided they were going to very dramatically not just kind of like it but the bang it or something all together so that's one thought I think which in a sense we saw a repeat of that with America because of victories for granted because every time as I become an elder as the millennial why not are you an old person or an elder I choose elder but I feel that when you're younger you take the victories or the progress for granted and there are always those who are trying to undermine that progress and if you don't guard it jealously you wake up one day and you say wait a minute what just happened and so I think one of the things that our democracy our democracy as a whole insist that we do is pay attention to what's happening in that democracy because when you let down your guard someone is going to step in and try to change things for their own interests so if we are taking this big view of what do the people want how do the people engage the people have to remain focused on what is happening in our democracy and not just think oh the president I want one I'm good and sit back you know you have to have that constant engagement I think a greater investment in getting people engaged at the local and state level whether it be in elections or running for office elections or just being engaged in local and state politics which I think the Bernie Sanders is trying to create a good organization to do there seems to have been a lot of fighting going on but you know I think that's the right instinct and then just to think about history a little bit in reference to this one of the things that jumps out in thinking about how democracy has kind of expanded at times and contracted at times through history and gone through these waves which I think it has and now you know some people say that we're on the point potentially of another period of democratic contraction with these restrictions on voting and so on that we've been talking about although we're also sort of advancing some very promising expansions of democracy so I think it's more complicated than that but anyway one of the things that jumps out these efforts to restrict democracy seem to happen at times when there's an anxiety about demographic changes or kind of social changes that create a fear on the part of the sort of ruling class I guess or at least those in power that their power is now at risk so I'm getting this mainly by the way from the sort of most comprehensive book on the history of the right to vote which is by Alexander Kesar who's a Harvard professor called the right to vote and he talks about how states in the first half of the 19th century greatly loosened restrictions on voting and in other ways expanded democracy in this great period of kind of democratic flowering and he talks about how it was sort of lucky that those things were done in the sort of 1810's, 1820's before there was the beginning of a wave of immigration from Europe starting in the 1830's with the Irish and then continuing with Italians and Eastern Europeans and Jews later in the 19th century and once that started to happen he says if that had happened before states had expanded their suffrage laws and otherwise expanded democracy it probably never would have happened and once that immigration and that change of society did begin to happen you saw a backlash and you saw not just in terms of the south's response to the Civil War and ability to limit or almost end black voting in the south but northern states imposing voter registration and other restrictions in terms of literacy and religious tests and other things that were clearly designed to go after these new voters immigrants and working people who it was thought didn't share the same kind of values of the existing American population so that's a long thing and I don't know what the lesson exactly we draw from it today is but that seems to be a big piece of this push and pull over democracy and obviously part of what we're experiencing now with the demographic changes that we're seeing now You also think about in the 70's and 70's the different waves of movements the civil rights movement the women's movement the environmental movements that were kind of forcing through the anti-war movement forcing through huge change that clean air, clean water the civil rights laws and it was after that that Lewis Powell wrote the great memo to the conservatives that said things are getting out of control here they've taken too much stuff we need to roll back and it was because they really were we had in fact passed laws that had long term impact on what they were able to do and it was about the common good it was about clean water which meant that they couldn't pollute and so they looked at it and said they wanted they had an economic need to realign power and they put together a strategy that has been eating away at our democracy since and meanwhile we haven't gone back to looking at what we need to do to kind of secure that if you think about how we need to do our campaign the community real investment act was an act that started around redlining in houses in Chicago but it just didn't solve the problem of redlining with those houses in Chicago it actually changed the power dynamic because it required banks to have more transparency and put resources into community organizations that could monitor what was going on in finance so that changed the power structure so it's kind of like as we passed minimum wage laws we need to do more than pass minimum wage laws we at least have to index them so they keep on going up we should try to have an enforcement mechanism that actually makes them enforceable and it would be great if there were unions around so they could actually organize workers and so how do we just not think about what laws we're going to pass that are going to solve a problem today but actually puts more resources into it policy wise so that it's actually changing the lay of the land and so whether it's how do we miss the vote on motor voter or not actually have it enacted across the country and actually enforce when are those things that we could actually change things we should learn from the past there were times that we actually did that and how do we now kind of reshift our thinking I think that we could do I don't think we're going to pass mandatory voting tomorrow but why aren't we trying to figure out a strategy for that people know people in our country polls going back to when I was a change to win would say people want a government that's on their side it's not as if they hate government they just think that this one is rigged against them and they won't want it on their side how do we start talking about mandatory voting in a way that is actually about having a government that's on our side how do we change our language and stranger strategies so that we actually get to a place where every voice that actually does I agree with that and one of the things that I've been working on for a while now too picking up on that I guess is that a lot of us in the voting rights field I plead guilty the most we so focus on changing the laws and litigation and getting providing new opportunities to vote passing these laws and so on and I'm doing this pro voter stuff now is like step one and you have to have the follow through so you need to have the enforcement and the actual implementation of voter-voter and then you need to have mobilization around these new laws and so on and so on so it's really a much longer trajectory towards change than just getting the laws changed I want to make sure we have time for some comments and questions from the audience try and who's in the back has a microphone please say who you are and your most relevant institutional affiliation and try to make it a question my name is Emily Shaw I'm from the Sun Lake Foundation and thank you so much for this really interesting panel I work on state level reform especially around open government and several of you touched on this but the thing that I see as the most kind of pressing question is how we organize and fund all of this work as you know state level work and local level work to spread across the country is incredibly expensive and that's been a big challenge and it's been one of the things that has made having a significant funder like a set of Hope Brothers so important for achieving kind of systematic change in any direction and so you know I think this is for me been the big sticking point understanding like what does an organizing structure or a funding structure that helps to pass this information along and helps to kind of keep the level of attention on state houses that we all know is actually necessary do we have any thoughts on that it was a genuine question so I mean the labor movement had it because they had dues check off right so they had regular resources coming in Acorn used to have a community small amount too I think that one of the fundamental questions is how do we have organizations that are engaging people have a sustainable funding base and how do we help them think about what it is to be able to do that because right now I think so many are dependent on funders and foundations which are fickle at best and often times as short term as we're worried about and so I do think that we need to figure that out you know figure that out I think that there are organizations trying to do that there's the whole table around what is a canvas and how can canvases work to help build that out I think there's been some work going on around how to do small donors that would fund organizations in states I think we also need to figure out how it's not a one time thing because as you said this is work that you needed to do over a period of time so I mean the current organization that I work for is very focused on empowering state based and local organizations because ultimately they're the ones who know they're only of the land the best and how to make things happen and I think you know it's been back and forth dialogue in my opinion over the last several years that funders have sort of promoted also but you know this idea of well you know how do we have a coordinated strategy at the national level versus how do we empower state organizations to really do the work in the states and I think there's an increasing recognition amongst some groups at least in DC that you can't just have this DC group that like sort of parachutes in that you need a sustained investment in state based organizations and local organizations who are there for the duration and I think funders to some extent are also thinking about that too as well as the idea that you know you can't just again parachute in in September of an election year to fund organizations but that is a year round as the term I was using earlier but a holistic comprehensive trajectory that you have to fund and not just you know have these one offs role we tend to work in silos and I think part of what we're talking about up here also is coordination and integration and intersecting how we talk about the issues, how it relates to voting I mean my challenge that I face is I'm talking about a process right but how does that process affect policy and having that conversation and then how is it what role does it play in the overall long term strategy of whatever policy you want to and how does national groups support and help local groups and how does that coordination happen in an integrated way and I do see that as the challenge that we're facing Ed Berger the report references behavior and interest over and over again to the issue of percentage who vote and it's my strong impression that looking way back the United States has had a terrible record compared with other parts of the industrialized world and the developing world of voting why is that true if it is true and what do you think we should do about it and I heard the phrase mandatory voting from at least one of you so I gather that's something that may be on your mind as well as the person who wrote a lot of the report that actually works internationally in other countries on their elections I can say a little bit about that it is true that it has almost always been ranked among the worst in the industrial world in terms of voter turnout I think that there are a couple of different reasons it is true that the ones at the top of the list have mandatory voting and I'll never forget when I was first starting out my career they had the State Department brought in this Australian member of parliament to talk to me about voting issues and we talked about mandatory voting I was asking her questions and she said her response was I was asking do people vote just because they have to and they don't actually really know but they know they're going to get fined I think because we have mandatory voting most people actually take it upon themselves to learn about what's going on because they know they're going to have to vote the ironic twist in the story is that woman was Julia Gillard who lives here several years later and I like to tell that story but the mandatory voting thing but the other piece of it is that most of these countries have what we're calling here automatic voter registration where people it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that everyone who's in the country and eligible to vote is on the voter registration list through one means or another we don't do that here we make it incredibly difficult actually to register to vote for the voter barrier to vote a participation there is in our process and so a lot of us my organization Liz Kennedy from CAF is in the audience are working on efforts in the states to try and put the burden more on government and government agencies to engage and register people rather than having people fill out these forms and send them to the right place which is very different than other countries how they operate I would be remiss in saying that there obviously are cultural and social issues that are to bear one of the things that is really sad right now especially is that because the corporate elites and the billionaires of the world do seem to control our elections and people feel like they have much more influence over not only our elections but our public policy a lot of people are just throwing their hands up and being like well my vote doesn't matter anyway the rich and powerful decide anything no matter how I vote and it's this sort of like this really perverse thing that's happening that you don't really see in other countries that have more limitations on the campaign finance situation so again another way that they are very very length so but the cynicism is real and then the first Tuesday of November between certain hours when people have maybe three jobs it makes it really hard when there are limited access to polling places and so even in the efforts that have tried to expand that in Oregon where there's mail balloting the voting percentages are much higher and so I think that we've seen that in some places where it's been easier to vote people vote more so I think that there's that other piece of it that we can do having been called upon Liz Kennedy from the Center for American Progress thank you so much for this wonderful panel and I really appreciate having all of these issues discussed across silos I agree that's a big problem and thinking about the ideological frame here to just bring us back to the big picture I think Anna you mentioned the Pal memo of course how do we revitalize the sense of the public really kind of enshrined the idea that private power is somehow sometimes better or sometimes less corrupt a private authority and that the public has been really denuded whereas you know Eleanor Roosevelt tells us that democracy has to be shown to be about action not words if people are breaking government then why will people like government so if we can talk about the ideological ways in which we can kind of enrich the theory of the public and a positive vision of democracy and how that can maybe take us forward through the next few decades I think that it is it shouldn't be hard to do but it is hard to do because so many people who have the microphone in our democracy are afraid of that so the idea of power of the people so to speak is as Zach had in his book there are a lot of people who think that weren't too stupid to know that it's best for everybody or if we think it's best for everybody it's not going to be best for 1% I think that one of our promises has also been in Congress I laid out years ago all kinds of research that people believe in government they just want to work for them and that they believe in the American dream they just wanted their jobs protected they wanted da-da-da-da and we didn't push an agenda our elected officials did not who were supposedly on people's side that was going to deal with all of that because so much of their funding and so much of the time is spent on fundraising that they limit themselves to making sure that they're not going to piss off the financial industries of the world or the corporate protectors and so instead of actually doing what's going to engage people and change their belief in government they actually hold back so I think that it takes people like us really putting together a longer term agenda electives feet to the fire electives on both sides of the party feet to the fire before they get elected and after they get elected to really kind of drive a much stronger agenda that really is about the common good and I think that when we actually looked at what are the demographic changes what can unite people as opposed to how it can be used to pit people against each other and actually at an agenda that weaves those communities together and have a dramatic impact and can I just add to that I mean I think it's easy to sort of talk about all these threats to democracy and get in a kind of doom and gloom mode but I think actually if you take a step back as we've alluded to a few times the battle has now been joined on both sides and we're seeing all of this positive momentum in terms of these things like automatic voter registration in terms of public financing on the money in politics front even on redistricting reform on the gerrymandering issue and I think that part of the reason for that is actually that when this stuff comes up as a political issue yes there are the people that I write about in the book who sort of don't believe in democracy on an ideological level but I think there are more people who do believe in it and I actually think democracy as a value is pretty popular the word democracy maintains a kind of a hold on people it hasn't been sort of debased in the way that some other political terms have so there's a lot of advantages there that are on the side of people working to expand democracy and it's easy to sort of think of the other side as these kind of master strategies to plot 20 years in advance and everything that they want to happen comes true but I think it's actually sort of a much more equal fight than that and the developments that we've seen in the last few years to me are quite hopeful I just want to step out of my moderator role because it's been mentioned a couple of times there are people who think that the Powell memo is not nearly as significant as it's sometimes there is one person that's me there's a piece actually in the Washington Monthly that's floating around here where I kind of reiterate that argument and part of the reason it's important is because you know we can't exaggerate the sense of a master plan and sometimes you have to go through life fighting for incremental changes and fighting for democracy without a master plan and we exaggerate sometimes the sense of a master plan Mark read an advance copy of the report and pointed that out to us and made us really struggle how much to emphasize the Powell memo in the report it's like one little thing yeah you messed us all up so I think that it's not that we always have to have one grand plan and that there aren't strategic opportunities to do smaller things it is thinking about the future and where we want to get as an example some friends of mine who have been very involved in organizing Uber drivers when we started looking at the future and said oh yeah there's going to be driverless cars what is it about the gig economy that we have to organize around so that people have a fair shake because drivers will be gone and so how do we actually get ahead of it and so I'm not saying it's just like kind of like there's a plan and we put in a box in place and we somehow get there it is how to try to be more thoughtful about the long term and what is out there that we can harness and take of the energy I think we have one question over here so we'll probably have to wrap it up after this everybody from what I've heard has been talking about information history and things like that in terms of getting people to vote and understanding how the United States has gone over the years one of the things that I don't see is how can we say we put like a constitution class in high school 11th and 12th graders have to understand what voting is and give them an idea of what the political structure is in the history of America and voting and how important it is because you'll find out that most 11th and 12th graders they turn 18 and they're clueless okay so how do we start making them understand and know what they have to do as they get older and the importance of voting I think that's a great point because one of the other things that I wrote about is that civic education is not a glamorous topic but I think it's on the right way and my thing is that it should be combined with pre-registration so there are some states that allow 16 and 17 year olds to be registered to vote and then that becomes activated when they turn 18 if you can combine actually registering high school students with a civic education program that not only talks about history but also gives people the practical tools that they need in order to know how to vote to know where their polling place is to know how to register we who are in rooms like this assume a level of interest and understanding of the practical mechanics of the process that just don't even exist and so I'm a huge proponent and would really pitch for a fresh look at how we approach civic education and how we can grow it in the schools along with side by side with pre or incorporated with pre-registration because I think also those who are suppressing laws and crafting these subtle ways of disfranchising people they count on people not being as aware and confusion to help to move their agenda and I would know that in our election protection hotline we've learned to ask when people call on Election Day and say oh I want to vote and where do I vote to ask them if they're registered because there are even people who don't know that you need to register in order to be able to vote so it's vitally necessary I think this has been wonderful I feel like it's the beginning of a long process of beginning to think about these issues in a much more integrated way and get some communities connected in ways that they have been in the past wonderful conversation wonderful book wonderful report the report you can get you can pick up the book you should buy and but they're different and both worth reading in different ways so I really appreciate all of you for coming and especially especially this wonderful group of people up here so thank you very much