what do you see when you look at this a chicken maybe a giraffe well that's actually Colorado's first congressional district how about this a Lobster Claw someone awkwardly holding a baby no it's actually New Jersey's e8th district and this one that is Florida's 20th district and that's the stage I'm in now I love Florida sure elections are a contest of candidates and policies and ideas but they're fought on a set of ground rules and in America those ground rules are constantly shifting sometimes shifting in favor of one side other times in the other direction usually the voters get to pick the politicians in redistricting the politicians get to pick the voters elections are forward according to a set of lines on a map the process to drawing those lines is called districting and manipulating those districts often into weird and crazy shapes has been part of American elections since almost the very beginning political geram mandering is probably one of the greatest threats to our democracy right now you have an election in a little more than 60 days and they changed the district on you let's terminate Jerry mandering here in Florida Republicans have used every tool available to deal themselves a better hand including a set of new maps that favor their own s they've done the same in other states like North Carolina and Texas Democrats they're know better in places like Illinois and New York they're accused of doing exactly the same thing well it's very political well it's certainly a brazing power scrap and district lines are just one way that politicians can tilt the rules in their favor long before election day rolls around America's electoral system is littered with advantages that help those in power stay in power and it's completely legal they're not doing anything wrong it's part of the system they're not even really trying to hide it and from the outside that seems a little off those who are already in power draw the maps it's made very few seats competitive I don't know that anything's ever going to end your mandering that's just human nature on this part of our series are America's politicians rigging elections for themselves and can anything be done about [Music] it for virtually his entire political career Donald Trump's been making claims like there was a rigged election okay I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens but the system folks is rigged it's a rigged disgusting dirty system to this day there's no evidence of of Elections being rigged at least not in the way he's suggesting whether he meant it or not he does kind of have a point some things do seem fixed Miami is not the first place that Springs to mind when you think politics but Florida has been a flash point in US political life since the 2000 election it's one thing that nearly everyone agrees is broken with a American elections it's called Gary mandering generally I say it's the drawing of lines for political or personal gain they drawing it to help a party or help a candidate and does it happen in America it happens a lot in America definitely the whole point of districting is to create districts with equal populations so everyone's vote counts equally here's how it works or at least the simple version say a state contains an equal number of Republicans and Democrats 40 of them and it's broken up into eight congressional districts if you draw the districts like this with five voters in each seat you'll find both parties win four seats each a lot of people would say that's the ideal you win half the votes you get half the seats but there are many ways to draw lines and Jerry mandering is all about drawing districts in ways that maximize the number of seats your party can win let's say we draw the lines this way the Democrats can win six seats or Draw it this way the Republicans win six these examples show you two ways gerrymandering is done hacking and cracking this cluster of Democrats has been cracked across four seats putting them in minority in all of them well this cluster of Democrats has been packed into two dist districts giving them big majorities but wasting votes they could have used to win seats elsewhere packing can even help a party in minority win a majority of seats in this example where the Republicans have eight votes to the Democrats 13 well they can turn just over a third of the vote into 2/3 of the seats jerem mandering can be good for the political the politician and a political party I'm not sure it's good for the citizens at at large redistricting is a normal process it should happen on a regular basis in the US redistricting happens every 10 years after the census and that's so adjustments can be made to keep similar numbers of Voters in each seat but it's not the only thing on people's minds is it illegal to draw district lines in a way that favors one party or the other no there's no roles in that whatsoever no it used to be hotly contested uh but a few years ago the US Supreme Court took a step back and said no we're not going to oversee this field and there's just no way to measure it Doug Johnston knows a lot about redistricting because he's involved in creating the maps his company helps counties and states with the process most of his clients are in local government and he does it with mapping software loaded with all sorts of demographic data and it will show me the percentages so with one click I can look at what's the Latino percentage of an area uh with another click I can look and see what's the Asian-American percentage of an area it's data that can be used to ensure that your voters end up in your Turf then of course there's what the incumbents want and whenever when the incumbents are drawing the lines then they get into all kinds of factors of wanting uh you know higher income areas because they're more likely to be campaign donors um some members of Congress might want college students others might not politicians can even use these maps to keep their Rivals at Bay members don't want another member in their District cuz they want to run against them but they will also look down and say who's the state legislator most likely to run against me draw them out you who's the city council member who's clearly ambitious draw them out of my district send them over there it feels really Brazen what they what they doing and how they motivated it is very brazing it is indeed to be fair when the Democrats were in charge the Democrats did it that way as well and this has been the process uh for for forever this isn't new it dates back a long way if you want to understand Jerry mandering you need to know about Jerry or should I say Gary you see while the US Constitution spelled out a lot of rules around elections the founding fathers left a lot of the Hat now up to the states that lack of definition and that gift of self-determination quite literally shaped American democracy from the very beginning it took just 25 years before someone came up with the idea of gerrymandering and that's where Gary comes in Elbridge Gary this is him one of the Lesser known founding fathers of the United States he was one of the signaries of the Declaration of Independence he was also the fifth vice president but in 1812 he was governor of Massachusetts the state legislature which was controlled by his party the Democratic Republicans was in the process of drawing up the districts For an upcoming election and they used that power to their advantage they packed the areas that voted for their opponents into a couple of districts and spread their own vote across more districts that way they'd win more seats and control the government Gary wasn't totally comfortable about it he called it highly disagreeable but he signed it into law anyway it left Massachusetts electoral map with some very oddly shaped districts including this one Gary's own District of Essex starting near Boston and stretching up towards New Hampshire then curving around towards the north the Boston Gazette called it a monster its illustrators Drew Claws and wings on it it looked like a salamander no said someone a gander and somewhere along the line the G became a j and everyone started calling it Jerry mandering gerrymandering became a way of political life in the US but fast forward to the 20th century and things went into overdrive three districting is democracy at work redistricting is like an election in Reverse it's a great event that is Thomas Hoffler he was a Republican strategist who for decades Drew maps for party usually the voters get to pick the politicians in redistricting the politicians get to pick the voters and here he was a decade earlier I Define uh redistricting as the only legalized form of vote stealing left in the United States today when he died in 2018 his daughter released hundreds of his private files and emails a lot of them related to redistricting in the state of North Carolina spreadsheets that broke every District down by race spreadsheets that mapped the age of Voters in every District spreadsheets that showed how far away residents lived from a voter registration office and whether they were black or Native American or Asian and it gave Republican lawmakers everything they needed to know to draw new boundaries that worked to their advantage heavily Democratic districts split right down the middle in one case right through the middle of a university dormit Tre just the right number of Republicans to win the election without wasting a vote in another district and because it's not illegal they didn't even try to hide it to the extent are going to use political data in drawing this map it is to gain partisan advantage on the map I want that criteria to be clearly stated and understood many of the races were over before they even began and despite the widespread agreement that these practices damage America's democracy it continues to this day including here in Florida in an unusual move Governor Ronda Sanz has submitted a proposal to reshape the state's Congressional map this map will look nothing like this in Florida as is the case in many states in the union the states politicians draw the maps and in this state the Republican Party holds a majority the latest lines for the state's congressional districts were drawn by a subcommittee of the state State Legislature we are task withdrawing 28 new congressional districts a group that contained 19 Republicans and seven Democrats Kelly Skidmore was the most senior Democrat on the committee no matter how you you you try to influence the process you really can't the state legislature came up with a set of maps but while they were being debated Florida Governor Rona santis made it clear the maps were DOA Dead on Arrival and he'd be vetoing them if they passed it is strange it's unusual no governor in the history of Florida has ever inserted himself into this process it uh it was the first time in our history that a governor uh weighed in in this way the house ended up passing a different set of maps that were more to the governor's liking and Florida's congressional districts went from this to this adding according to analysts at 538 four Republican leaning seats and slashing the number of competitive seats from five to two it's the biggest problem house Democrats claim is that the map creates four more republican-leaning districts they're taking the heart and soul of our state of our people the Voting Rights Act allows for the creation of majority minority districts designed to address America's history with discrimination sometimes there are trade-offs and fights over which principles of drawing districts take priority and when the new districts were passed it started a legal fight over District 5 that continues to this day it's unconstitutional to draw a district like that where race is the only Factor this used to be District 5 it stretched long and thin 250 kilomet across the north of the state a bit weird but if we overlay a different map you'll see why this map shows you where the African-American population of Florida lives Florida's Fifth District took in two parts of the state with large African-American populations the cities of Tallahassee and Jacksonville it actually loops around uh White parts of Jacksonville and loops around white parts of Tallahassee to not include them in order to make sure that it's a uh a district where the African-American voters would elect their per candidate we were able to elect from that District a black representative to congress and the governor was not satisfied until that was an impossibility the new maps basically threw this District out with different pieces of the former fifth being absorbed into other districts districts across the north the districts are more compact they look less weird but challenges say it violates a fundamental rule of redistricting and what he did was broke up that District in such a way that it would be impossible for anyone except a conservative white politician or a very very conservative black politician could get elected and that was not in the best interest of the people in this District there's a patchwork of laws setting out the rules for district boundaries some of them spring from the Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act do Inman Johnson challenged the legality of the maps arguing they breach the 14th and 15th amendments my core argument was that the governor had a racist racial motivation in the elimination of Congressional District 5 do you think abolishing that district is in breach of the Voting Rights Act I do because it did diminish the vote um it did diminish the community's opportunity to vote for a representative of their choice there are situations where minority districts may be appropriate but when minority districts are drawn in such a way that they're so deander that they're not compact no I don't think that that is serving uh the country well because what you're then getting into is a pitting of one group against another F there's now a divide over whether majority minority districts are needed at all has America moved on they probably should have existed at one point in time and so what may have been needed to rectify a situation in the past may not be uh necessary today and into the future what do you make of that this is not a colorblind country there is clear racism and people who don't make up the majority has to have to have laws that protect them those laws mean these cases often end up in the courts the maps drawn in the last round have been the subject of challenges in more than half of the states there have been at least 84 court cases and the vast majority of the challenges have been in cases where a single party controlled the entire process Doug Johnston appeared as an expert witness for the State of Florida as it defended one of the cases against it in the courts so the question was is it still in a situation where the Discrimination justifies race being the predominant factor and is using race as the predominant Factor still allowed by the US Supreme court it's just striking me that you've got all of these quite complicated rules that are all gray in many ways it gives someone who wants to sort of entrench their own partisan benefit ample room to do so and and claim it for some other reason yes and it also subjects you to the swings of the court so when the when the power on the state supreme court shifts then the interpretation of law can shift pretty significantly do Inman Johnson loster challenge the courts allowed the maps to stand the Republicans might have control to draw the boundaries in Florida but up further north in Illinois Democrats have the Reigns and they're playing the same [Music] game this is the old map of Illinois in place until 2020 and this is the new one it tilted the balance towards the Democrats adding two seats to the list of those leaning their way and taking away to from the Republicans take a look at Illinois's 13th District a snake stretching from one side of the state to the other but zoom in on Chicago The Bluest part of the state you've got all these districts that start in urban areas but then extend out into suburban and rural areas what ends up happening in Illinois when the Democrats control the line drawing is an effort to extend the power of the blue voters as far out as as we can you can really see the craziness as these districts go into the the deep blue area with dense dense Democratic votes and try to split that up into as many districts as they can gerrymandering can be a powerful tool for incumbents to protect their own jobs and defend themselves from challenge whether intended or not it can also contribute to gouging out the political Center in more competitive districts politicians are forced to reach across the aisle they tend to be more moderate the advantage there is not only do you make more seats competitive but it also means that uh politicians have to compete for everybody's votes because they're not in safe seats they're not in a safely Republican uh District or Democratic district and what that does is it means uh they've got to not just appeal to the streams of their party and look at these numbers analyzed by 538 they grouped members of Congress into their various caucuses and looked at the margins they held their seats by far right obstructionist members won their seats with margins of 24% in 2020 Democrats on the left of the party won by 45 points on average moderates in both parties won by far less just 10 points or so which means the moderate voices in the middle are the most vulnerable to lose their seats so there's a lot of power vested in the people who draw the lines on these state maps decisions you make can affect a candidate's chances of election in Australia those decisions are a responsibility that is given to Independent commissions involving electoral administrators and surv General in Australia you have a civil service that's largely apolitical that don't get involved in politics and they're really just technical experts so that's a clear way to to assign the job to Independent experts and there's what 150 years of them traditionally being independent in the US we don't have anything like that the founding fathers when they wrote the Constitution left so much of these powers to the States was that a mistake well obviously those guys got along real well in 178 7 and couldn't imagine that things could go this far wrong farther down the road Jerry mandering is one of the best examples we have with his strong agreement that the current situation is far from ideal that the people doing it have a conflict of interest that it creates an unfair playing field and that voters hate it a you go Poll for the IST after the latest redistricting round found about 2ir of American adults think electoral District Maps should be drawn by independent commissions that's something Democrats and Republican voters agree on in Australia we have a process that's nonpartisan we have an independent commission draw these districts would that work here possibly but it all depends on who's doing the appointing and U and again we're back to the same question I'm not real sure that would be necessarily any any better there are ways and other states do it where there is an independent redistricting uh uh committee that uses experts uh that draw the maps based on what the Constitution requires uh and those are the states where there are more competitive seats and more balanced legislatures I wish it was done like that here in the US I don't think [Music] legislators who have a direct benefit from how they draw the districts should be the ones drawing the districts trying to tackle it is a lot of work and this will never be the most urgent or important issue whether or not we can we must try is anyone trying other states are no one in Florida is the thing is it's so intrinsic linked with many of the issues that are driving voters up the wall polarization the absolute gridlock in Congress voter turnout it's a factor in all of that I don't know that anything's ever going to end gerer mandering because the politicians are always going to uh wish to either save themselves Advance themselves or whatever their political agenda may be that's just human nature the system has long been this way but it's been supercharged in the last few decades and if the collective response of politicians is me is there any one to vote as a m next time why just have one election when you could have thousands the United States took elections and applied them to all manner of public servant positions copious number of Schoolboard districts water districts open space districts Health districts and umen other districts that exist in America next time we'll ask is it all a bit much has America overdone democracy [Music] [Music] [Applause]
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