Factually! with Adam Conover - Democracy is in the Details with Tomas Lopez

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Voting rights are under assault around the country. And while we tend to see “democracy" as a big, abstract noun, it’s the smallest, most mundane details that determine whether or not people actually have the right to vote. This week Adam sits down with Tomas Lopez, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, a non-partisan organization that works to expand ballot access and protect voting rights in one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. Learn more by visiting https://democracync.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Or even if you don't have an opinion about it, I would love to hear from you. Email me at factually at adamconover.net and tell me what you think. Okay, now let's get to the show. You know, democracy is a big word in America. It's a word we use a lot without really thinking about what it means. You know, it's a big abstract noun that we pledge our love and devotion to at the beginning of baseball games and, you know, in the mornings before we learn long division. We all hold our hands to our hearts and pray to our great God, democracy. It's the foundation of our constitution, our branches of government, and in many ways, our sense of citizenship. But the daily reality of democracy is actually very small. It consists of tiny details,

and those details can sway the outcome of massive elections. Let me give you an example from my own life. Last election cycle, I was volunteering for a candidate for my local city council race here in LA. Now, in LA, not a lot of people know about the city council race here in L.A. Now, in L.A., not a lot of people know about the city council race. I mean, some people do. The people who do really care about it. But I'm just going to go out and say like 90 percent of people don't even know what the fuck a city council member is, what they do or when they should vote for it. But despite that lack of knowledge and interest in the races. The position is extremely powerful. So the candidate I was volunteering for

ran on a strategy of educating the public about how important this position was and explaining why they should vote for them. So here's what we did. We would set up tables near a polling place. And when people walked by on their way to the polling place, we would ask them if they knew who they were voting for for city council.

And if they said no, we would say, okay, well, this is an incredibly important position. Here's what it's responsible for. It determines everything from the fight against homelessness to development in your neighborhood. And here's a candidate who you could vote for. And here's what she stands for. And, you know, if we were able to have that conversation,

that person would go into the voting booth a lot more likely to check anything in that box at all because they were now aware of the race in the first place. It was a good strategy based on the kind of one-on-one neighbor-to-neighbor interaction that really helps people take part in democracy and in our civic society. But our ability to execute that strategy was entirely dependent on where the laws said that we could set up our tables. See, according to LA law, electioneering isn't allowed within 100 feet of polling places in LA. And that's a good policy. You don't want people, you know, campaigning right outside the

door of the polling place. You want to make sure there's a healthy distance there. But this meant that the physical architecture of the polling place determined so much about how we were able to campaign. At some polling places, well, 100 feet away would position us right between the parking lot and the entrance to the polling place. But at other polling places where the sidewalk and parking lot were organized a little bit differently, the closest spot that was 100 feet away would be all the way across a busy street. And we'd be stuck waving at people as they just walked in completely ignoring us because we were four lanes of traffic away from them. We almost certainly got a lot less votes at polling places that were set up that way. My point is these are small details, right?

The law that says you have to be within this many feet away, the organization of the sidewalk versus where the parking lot is. All those little details had a huge impact on the vote total. Now, this is just a little example from my own life, but the truth is that the rules make all the difference in American democracy. Rules that were not written to benefit one party or the other, but have a vast effect on the outcome. Now, think about all the other rules that determine American democracy. My God, there are thousands of them. For instance, in America, we have to sign up to vote. You have to register to vote on purpose. Doesn't happen automatically. But if we were to institute automatic voter registration, it could add more than 22 million newly registered voters to the

rolls. And that would change the outcome of our elections. Getting rid of felony disenfranchisement laws would also add more than 6 million voters. Or just think about how the fact that Election Day is not a national holiday affects who can and can't vote. Some people can't leave work because they're too busy. Others have to take care of their children and aren't able to make it out to the polls. Those people, sure, still have the right to vote as laid out in the Constitution, but the rules that we have implemented around voting,

the fact that it's not a national holiday, determines whether or not they are actually able to vote. It doesn't really matter what George Washington and Thomas Jefferson wrote down with their inky quills on that old piece of parchment. Unless those moms can find some babysitters that night, they are not going to be able to vote. Even something as simple as how the ballots are designed

can make a difference. Do you remember the infamous butterfly ballot from the 2000 election in Florida? It was a ballot that was so confusingly designed that it led thousands of people to accidentally punch a ballot for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore in Palm Beach County in Florida, which ended up giving the entire election to George W. Bush. So that butterfly had a major

effect. The point is that our ideals about democracy as enshrined in the Constitution and the amendments that expanded them are wonderful, but the ideals are not enough. The rules we make around democracy dictate the results. A tiny impediment to voting can be effective disenfranchisement for a huge swath of the population, whether it's a ballot that's too hard to read or a polling place that closes too early. There's a reason that the recent law passed in Georgia to tamp down on voting rights was so petty as to restrict people from giving food and water to voters waiting in line to vote. Because something that small, just a thirsty mouth or a rumbly tummy, could really be enough to stop people from voting and sway the results of an election. And you know, as much press as that law in Georgia has gotten, this issue is not at all new. Sure, America has expanded the vote to more and more people over time.

But think about this. It's only since the 1960s and the Voting Rights Act that we've even really attempted to be a full democracy that allowed all people to vote. As long as we voted, there has been a battle over who gets to vote and what the rules around voting are with the express purpose of stopping certain people from voting and ensuring election outcomes for certain politicians. And with the rise in voter disenfranchisement bills across the country, well, there's no question that that battle continues today. But, you know, as long as those in power have been fighting to stop people from voting, there have been courageous folks fighting to expand the franchise

and expand voting rights and voting access to as many people as possible. And my guest today is someone on the right side of this fight. His name is Tomas Lopez, and he's the executive director of Democracy North Carolina. Democracy North Carolina is a nonpartisan organization that uses research and organizing and advocacy to increase voter participation,

reduce the influence of big money in politics, and try to expand voting access to everyone in their state. I'm thrilled to have him on the show. Please welcome Tomas Lopez. Tomas, thank you so much for being here. Sure, thanks for having me. So just give me a brief overview of what Democracy North Carolina does. Sure. So Democracy North Carolina, and I'll start with this, right? We're a nonpartisan organization.

We're not affiliated with any political party, any political candidate. And we're focused on democracy with a lowercase d, right? The idea that every one of us has a stake in the political process and that that stake in the political process is tied to so many of the other things that we think are important. And so we're really trying to do a few things at once. One is strengthen our state's democratic structures. So our right to vote, our representation through things like redistricting, and also the ways in which big money can end up affecting our political process too. Second is we're trying to get people involved in the political process. And again, lowercase p politics, this idea that, you know, not so much thinking about, you know, red team or blue team,

although we have a point of view on the world, but what does it mean to be engaged in your community in an effective way to try to achieve a just and equitable community and state? And then the third is we're really interested in advancing the idea that, you know, democracy is worth the effort, that it's worth a fight, and that it's worth transforming. So there are a lot of promises that are loaded up in that word. And in many ways, we as a country have failed to meet them, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be working to still achieve them. Now, so it sounds like you're doing work that is both on the big end of democracy reform, litigation, redistricting.

Those are state level. And you're doing on the ground, knocking on doors, helping people get registered to vote like that sort of person to person kind of thing. That's exactly right. And so tell me about what the situation is in North Carolina. is in North Carolina. My understanding is that North Carolina, as far as voting rights go, is, I'm not going to put too fine a point on it, one of the most fucked up states in terms of voting rights in the country. I mean, it's up there in some ways. I mean, what's interesting about North Carolina is that in some ways, North Carolina has been ahead of the game. And that is what has made it, especially over the last 10 years, one of the places that you could call ground zero in the fight over voting access. So what we have in North Carolina is a state that, you know, again, much like much of the country, including particularly the South, long history of systemic racism, long history of segregation,

people being deliberately and structurally excluded from not just the political process, but public and economic life generally. What you had in the latter half of the 20th century was some advances that did increase participation in politics and voting from black North Carolinians in particular. And in the 2000s, a series of reforms to the political process that actually made voting more accessible in North Carolina and increased turnout in the state compared to many others, not just regionally, but even around the country. So in North Carolina, during that period, we were able to achieve a 17-day period for early in-person voting, which is a lot longer than a lot of states have. We were also able to

achieve the ability for people to register to vote during that early voting period, which again is something that you don't often see in a lot of the country. And even the ability for 16 and 17-year-olds to, at the time when they're like signing up for a driver's license, get what they call pre-registered to vote. So this idea basically that you fill out the paperwork and when you turn 18, there's nothing left for you to do. All of those things led North Carolina voters to show up in big numbers in the 2000s and particularly 2008. And in 2008, Barack Obama carried North Carolina. This is a politically diverse state. It's been one that people have identified as a battleground state in presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial elections. And so that political

background is really important to understanding why, in particular, we've seen efforts to make voting more difficult. In the 2010s, this state was one of a whole group that saw really comprehensive, not seen for a generation or more efforts to make voting more complicated. In 2013, we had a law that was passed that said, okay, remember that early voting? We're going to cut that down by a week. Remember that same day registration? We're going to get rid of that. Remember that pre-registration? We're going to get rid of that too. And on top of that, we're also going to make sure that you have to show particular strict kinds of photo identification in order to vote. That passed in 2013. And a few years later, in 2016, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, so a U.S. federal appeals court, was hearing a lawsuit

over this law, and they actually threw out a lot of that law. And at the time, what the court said was, we're looking at the way this was passed. We see this voter ID requirement, and we see that the kinds of IDs that are required are less commonly held by voters of color. We see that you've eliminated the first week of early voting, and we see that that first week of early voting is especially used by black voters. And we see that there is a design throughout this statute, this is again, was the 2013 law that in the words of the court targeted black voters with what they called almost surgical precision. So that's a judicial quotation. And it's one for people who are in North Carolina have heard a lot over the last few years. But the reason why is because it's so powerful and

so telling. What we've seen since then is that, again, a renewed effort around voter ID. So there was a new voter ID law passed that's now being litigated in the courts. We have seen continued tussles over what is the scope of early voting? What is the scope of same-day registration? And these are all happening with similar fights happening elsewhere around the country. In the national context of that, we can get into that as well, right, where it's no accident that states like North Carolina and Georgia and Texas have put forward some of the things that they've done over the last few years because of the loss of certain protections that we used to have under federal law. You had basically expanded voting

in North Carolina. Then Barack Obama wins and there's suddenly an effort to clamp down on the voting, on early voting and things like that. Now, voter ID, I've heard the justification for that before. It's always justified by voter fraud, for which there's very little evidence of wide scale voter fraud being an issue. This is constantly being litigated in the media. We don't need to get into that piece of it. But in terms of when you're a legislator putting forward a bill that says we're going to cut a week of early voting, what was the justification given for that? Again, there were in 20 back in 2013. In fact, one of the legislators said that was, you know, this was framed as voting reform. This was framed as something to bring uniformity to

voting that was framed as, you framed as some degree of making voting more efficient. But the other thing they said was, in light of a Supreme Court ruling that took away certain amounts of federal oversight over voting that would have required North Carolina's law to get approved before it could be implemented, the words that were used at the time were, well, now that that's gone, here are the words, now we can go with the full bill. This was a bill that was passed

explicitly with the idea that they didn't think they could get it passed when the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal court had to approve voting laws in states like North Carolina and others that were covered by the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. So the justification was court had to approve voting laws in states like North Carolina and others that were covered by the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. So the justification was the Supreme Court has

removed the provision of the Voting Rights Act that says we can't do this. So now we can. And that's why we're going to do it. More or less. That's pretty, that's pretty bald faced. I mean, you know, we, I assume we're going to get into a conversation about gerrymandering as well. The big problem with gerrymandering, the way that I've always framed it when I talk about it, is that gerrymandering is a process by which politicians choose their voters.

Which, hey, we draw the districts and we'll draw them around the voters that we want because those are the ones who we think will vote for us and we can therefore shape the state house or the congressional delegation around the voters. And we should not like that in a democracy. It should be the other way around. Power should flow from the people. The electeds shouldn't choose who is voting for them. This sounds very similar that, you know, you're you've lost an election.

You put forward a bill to reshape who is able to vote just in time rather than in space. Yeah, they're pretty transparent political motivations behind a lot of these laws. Right. And this is exactly what we're seeing right now. Right. You very recently that Georgia, the state of Georgia, passed legislation to make voting more difficult there, right? The provision in that bill that is really getting a lot of attention right now is a 2020 election cycle, but also the background of that in terms of what we heard both in the run-up to the election and especially after about unfounded theories around voter fraud and related conspiracies. Now, have you seen, as a reference to the law that was recently passed in Georgia, which has made national news. Have you seen any efforts like that in North Carolina? We've seen some of that, right? In North Carolina, what we've had is a bill that was just introduced that would change some of the deadlines, for instance, for absentee voting. So in North

Carolina, you can submit your absentee ballot a few days. You can have your if you submit your absentee ballot by Election Day, but the election officials don't get it. So a few days later, that ballot still counts. They want to make it so that it has to be in the election officials hand on Election Day at 5 p.m. You're potentially counting, you know, thousands of people, you know, with their ballots not counting. You have another bill that was just introduced that is pretty transparently an effort to target certain people from being removed from the voter rolls. So this is a little more complicated to explain, but it's basically what it would do is require the State Board of Elections to identify people from the voter rolls who've been excused from jury service because they said they weren't US citizens, and then release the names of people who've been excused from jury service as non-citizens, right?

Putting that, making that information available. So there are actually two angles on that, right? One is you're using this really inaccurate information to just throw people off of the voting rolls. A fact that many people may not find out about until they try to vote. And then second, you're creating a list of people,

whether or not accurate, where you're basically saying, oh yeah, these people are non-citizens in a highly sensitive time for our immigrant communities, right? We're just going to publish that information, your name, address, in a highly sensitive time for our immigrant communities. We're just going to publish that information, your name, address, your birth date, and put that out in the world.

So let me ask you this before, because I have a ton I want to ask you, but it's sort of a looming question that I have based on what we were just talking about. You said at the beginning that you're a nonpartisan group. How do you maintain that? Or how do you square that with the fact that so many of these moves

are specifically partisan in nature, that you're talking about greater voter restrictions were put in in response to an election happening. And when, you know, to be honest, the folks who are pushing for greater election access, that is a project that is aligned with the

Democratic Party currently. Now, I'm not saying you can't be nonpartisan in that space, but it seems a little tricky. What is your approach to that? I mean, it's definitely tricky. I mean, I think, you know, there was a time, you know, as recently as 15 years ago, where voting rights were a relatively bipartisan issue. The Voting Rights Act passed the Senate, the reauthorization of Voting Rights Act, passed the Senate by a 98 to 0 vote in 2006. Wow. And it was signed into law by George W. Bush. Wow.

And it was only seven years after that that North Carolina's what we call the monster law passed. Wow. When I look at where we are today, it is true that elected officials from the Democratic Party are talking much more effectively and much more meaningfully about voting rights than a lot of Republican leaders. A lot of the bad ideas are being introduced by Republicans being signed in place by Republicans. We have to acknowledge that. I mean, that is the reality of what's happening. And, you know, we see a partisan motivation behind it. But, you know, the way that we do it is, you know, we're not trying to get in the middle of elections themselves to tell people, you know, that's kind of above our pay grade to say, how are you going to cast your vote? But when it comes to saying, look, we have a side in this issue, in this debate right

now over what becomes law and what doesn't, you know, we're going to come out in voting rights, in support of voting rights every time. So that's how we try to walk that line. It's not always easy, especially in the height of an election. I would also have to say that, you know, at this current place in time in North Carolina and nationally, we are in a system where one party tends to want to increase voting access and one party seems to tend to restrict it. But it's not necessarily going to stay that way. It depends on like I think it's very natural for politicians to want to pick their voters, uh, no matter who they are. And, you know, we've seen cases where look at primaries, right. Where there's been plenty of accusations where the democratic party in a primary will try to change the voting rules to disfavor one candidate over another. I heard there was a lot of chatter about that out of New York and the, you know, about the last Democratic primary among Bernie Sanders supporters saying, you know, that

they were, you know, the polls were being run in such a way that was an attempt to disenfranchise them. We don't need to get into the, get into that, but you can imagine, hey, maybe, maybe things will change. Maybe that party balance will change in a couple of years, but you'll still be for the principle that more voting access for more people make voting easier, make voting more accessible as a principle, would you not? That's right. Well, I think that party balance not only may change, but it has changed. history of voting legislation and voting access in the United States, right? It was, you know, the segregation in terms of voting, right, remained in place for many years because of an alliance that involved Southern Democrats. Yeah. Right. That it was, you know, it took bipartisan support to overcome that in 1965 to pass the Voting Rights Act. Now, the common thread from 1965 and everything that led up to that and where we are now is the threat of racial justice.

That when we talk about voting access, we talk about representation, we're talking about who gets to have a say in the life of our communities and our country. And at each step of the way, every time political access has been contested, the central question is, what voice do non-white people have? I mean, one thing that baffles me, especially when you put it that way, is, again, is there any sensible argument

for restricting voting rights? You know, if you have, like, is there any sensible argument for restricting voting rights? You know, if you have like, is there any argument that to you even is internally consistent that you might you know, you might say here's a good faith argument about why voting should be restricted to only on the day in person, extremely restrictive absentee ballots, all those sorts of things. Is there a principled reason that someone might push for that? Or is it only an attempt to exclude people of color or other people who, you know, one might not want to vote in order to, again, choose your voters rather than the other way around? So one of the backdrop points that I actually think is helpful for us to talk through a little bit is how complicated elections are, like from the perspective of the people who run them. We've been talking here and I often think about it and talk about voting rights, redistricting as fundamental rights issues.

Like I said, it's a racial justice issue. And one of the things I learned when I began becoming involved in this work as a voting rights attorney was understanding just how technical and dry and really intricate the work is of running an election. You know, so it is, you know, I have a lot of appreciation in a way that I really could not have it without being in this work of like the work of the people who just even like work at voting locations or the people who are able to say, OK, we got to get this many voting machines to the school and this many machines to the church. And we've got to process the ballots and they all have to go through this five step process in order for this to happen. And actually think of people understood more about some of that stuff. They might have, uh,

you know, more of an appreciation of just how difficult it is to defraud the voting system. Right. Um, because there are a lot of people who work really hard to have designs in place that, that prevent the things that,

that all this stuff is purported to try to address. And so I do sometimes hear arguments that say, well, you know, we want to make sure that elections are managed, you know, consistently and in a way that, you know, works for the people who are running them. And, you know, my response to that is I agree. And that's why we should be resourcing elections in an effective way. Right. That we shouldn't be trying to run elections, you know, on the cheap. That, you know, this is one of the most important functions of government and we should be giving them the resources they need to be effective, which also includes things like making sure there's enough money to have enough places where people can go vote with staff to assist people as needed. Yeah. But one of the things that answer highlights for me, though, is how much the physical reality of how an election is organized fundamentally affects the outcome. You know, I did a lot of volunteer work with a campaign here for city council in Los Angeles. I spent time tabling, I made phone calls, you know, stuff like that. Really, really grassroots stuff. And it made me realize how much the outcome of an

election is determined by all of those physical features and not, you know, whether or not people like the candidate, what they think about their, you know, whether or not people like the candidate, what they think about their, you know, their, their positions, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, do people know the race is happening? Is it on a, is it on a day that they have off? Did they have a way to get there? You know, how did they deliver their ballot? Literally, was it raining that day? You know, all of these, all of these tiny little things. Was it a, you know, what was, what's the method by which the ballot is filled out? If it's a paper ballot that you get at home, what order do the names come in? What is the, okay, like a really big thing in our city council election is, because, you know,

LA has frankly too many elected officials, right? And so the elected official has their name and then they put a little, like, occupation name under the name of their, you know, under their name on the ballot.

So it'll say, like, if someone's running for school board, they'll put, like, you know, Susie Doe and then underneath, if it says teacher, she'll get a lot more votes. You know what I mean?

And, like, that is, like like an enormously important part of the election that like nobody even thinks about is. And so the question is, well, how do you choose what name goes underneath? Does the candidate have free reign? Is someone vetting the occupation that they put underneath? There was a dude in California who literally changed his name to judge because he thought it would make it more likely for him to get elected as judge. So he was Judge Sam whatever. And, you know, like these are – now that's a funny example. But, like, there are all these different things that matter so much.

And I don't know. It just makes me think that, like, it's, again, hard to separate this from the outcome of the election because this is what determines the outcome of elections. You know, like the election that I volunteered for was won simply because the candidate was able to mobilize people to show up and to make them aware the election was happening on this day and to make them look on their ballot below president. And that's like as much about making the election function well as it is about saying, hey, here are my ideas for how to run the city. And so the work that you're doing is almost like the foundational work that determines who gets elected in the first place.

I mean, I think we do think about it that way. I mean, there's so much, there are so many moving pieces that go into an election. Elections are in some ways like customer service events, right? You want the voter to have a good experience. But there's also all this back office stuff that you wouldn't think matters that in fact can affect an outcome. I'll give you an example from outside North Carolina.

So before I worked at, before I was in my role here at Democracy North Carolina, I was an attorney at a national organization, the Brennan Center for Justice. They work nationally on voting rights issues and some other related issues. And I remember when I was there, this was years ago, right? New York City had this ballot for mayor. And in New York City, there are the threshold to get on the mayoral ballot and for a party to get on the mayoral ballot, at least at the time, you know, was something that was relatively achievable. So you had, you know, you didn't just have like the big famous parties, right? The Republicans and the Democrats. You also had, and you didn't even just have like the well-known third parties, Working Families, Green, right? You know, the Conservative Party of New York. You had something called the Flower Party.

You had, you know, like the Pro-Mar marijuana party. You had, I mean, this guy got, you know, got memefied, right? The rent is too damn high party. Oh, yeah. Jimmy McMillan. Yeah, that's right. Underappreciate. We all made fun of Jimmy McMillan. I talk about this all the time. We all made fun of Jimmy McMillan. They made fun of him on SNL. The rent is too damn high. And guess what?

He was fucking right. The rent was too damn high. And he coined a political slogan that people still use. People still say that. Like, Jimmy McMillan, weird guy, and, you know, there's some other stuff in his political history I'm not a fan of, but like that, I'm sorry, I just

love Jimmy McMillan for that, and I think he deserves more credit for his run for mayor. But that sort of illustrates what I'm getting at here, right? Where New York, though, New York State, at least again at the time, I'm not totally up on what the latest is, but I don't think this has changed, has these very particular rules about how the ballot is supposed to look, right? And so what that meant was they had to squeeze these like 20 candidates into the rules that existed under state law. And so if you were a voter presented with this ballot

and say you wanted to vote, and what they were doing was they had to end up listing all the mayoral candidates in a block together where there was a row of eight, a row of eight, and then like a row of, you know, five or something. And so some of them, you know, were in like, you know, a column together. Now, a lot of voters will look at a ballot and they'll say, okay, I'm going to go vote down the line, right? I want to vote my party. I'm going to vote all the candidates of the party. But if you didn't pay close attention to what the ballot said, you end up voting for more than one candidate for mayor. Yeah.

So say you're a pretty progressive New Yorker who ascribes to the values of the Working Families Party, which is a progressive organization that works in many other places, but the New York Working Families Party, you know, you could end up choosing a candidate that's not from the WFP line because you didn't notice that the

candidate below them was from someone else. Or say you're a voter from the Conservative Party, right-wing party. Turns out that the candidate for mayor back on that ballot a few years ago, who was below the conservative party of New York candidate was the candidate from the socialist workers party. And, you know, the way it works is that if you bold in both, your vote doesn't count. Yeah. And it's just like the simple design of the paper ballot.

I have another example. Like that just puts me in mind of when I voted in election in New York City a number of years ago. When I grew up in New York, they had the really awesome ka-chunk, ka-chunk machine. They had this like big machine where you would go in and pull the lever. The lever would automatically close the curtain and then you would flip the things down. It was really old fashioned. But like it was like it was like voting with a typewriter. Like it was, you were walked inside a giant typewriter. It was awesome. Then they switched to like a digital, you know, a digital touch

screen system. And the first year that I voted in one of those elections, they had like, uh, when I registered, they had like a, you know, signature I had to sign when I registered. And then when I went to go vote, they said, oh, your signature doesn't match. And I was like, what? No, I mean, that's my signature. I can see it right there. And what happened was I have kind of a big signature and it had gone outside the box,

which normally I don't do, but it had cropped it, right? It had cropped the signature so that like the top of the A was cut off and et cetera. And I was like, I've used computers. So I was looking at it going, clearly this just cropped my signature. That's like 80 top of the A was cut off and et cetera. And I was like, I've used computers. So I was looking at it going, clearly this just cropped my signature. That's like 80% of my signature there

cropped off the top of the A and the C. And they were like, I don't know, it doesn't look the same. And I almost, you know, eventually they called someone over and was like an extra 15 minutes. And like, I was able to cast my ballot, but just a little technical thing like that, you know, is able to prevent people from voting. And that is it's not theoretical. Right.

That is what determines elections almost more than more than people looking at a candidate and saying, oh, I like this person's policies. Like who is able to get out and vote, whose vote ends up getting counted. whose vote ends up getting counted and, you know, whether or not, I mean, another really good example is like the way that the city council race was won was we went and tabled outside of the voting places and there's restrictions of where you can be. You can only be this many feet away. And you could tell most people are walking in. They don't even know what a city council person is. They've never heard of the race. So if they see our table, they're much more likely to vote in the race. So if the voting, now some of the polling places I tabled at to get within the number of feet away, you ended up being across the street or you ended up being not within the path that people took to walk

to the voting place. And at those places, I'm sure that we got many less votes simply for that reason, because of this weird physical anomaly in how the rules affected the tabling outside in this particular case. So these little tiny rule tweaks can make a massive difference. I've said that three or four different ways. But it raises I mean, it raises this kind of overarching point, right, which is that so much of what we think about in terms of protecting people's right to vote. And we have these narratives about these big sweeping laws that do bad things. They operate in really little ways. It's the cumulative effect. You know, I we our organization runs a hotline for people who have questions during the voting season.

And we got 14000 calls between like labor day and elect and just after election day the number one thing we get questions about is where do i go vote where do i go am i registered you know and that that's it and and that and that helps people right you give people that information okay let's look up your information let's let's see okay you're voting, you know, it's early voting. Okay, you can go anywhere in your county. Here are the places. Or it's election day. Okay, you got to go to this elementary school, and that's where you go vote. There is a lot of, you know, there is a lot for us to fight about, and yet there is a lot that we need not fight about that we can achieve that can actually really make a difference too. Yeah. Okay. Well, I have so many more questions

for you. I want to specifically ask you about gerrymandering and I want to ask you about the specific work that you do and find out more about it, but we've got to take a super quick break. We'll be right back with more Tomas Lopez. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, we're back with Tomas Lopez. I have so much more I want to ask you. I want to make sure we talk about gerrymandering. North Carolina is often talked about when we talk about gerrymandering.

Tell me a little bit about it. How bad is it? And what are you doing about it? You're able to do anything. It's a very sure. I mean, well, let's start with, you know, I think, you know, we'll start from square one, just in case somebody's really not familiar with this stuff. You know, gerrymandering, the term goes back centuries, right? It was, you know, but it's the idea that basically, the law, under the U.S. Constitution, actually, every 10 years we have a census. And once that census is done, state governments have to draw the lines for the members of Congress. So you're a member of Congress. You have to have a district.

We district needs to have geographic boundaries. It was discovered relatively early on in this process that, in fact, you could draw lines and ways to say, hey, there are a group of people that live over in this part of town that I think are more likely to vote for me. A group of people that live over in that part of town are more likely to vote for me. So I'm going to just squiggle the lines in such a way that doesn't necessarily make it so that that's a united community, but it helps me win. And that is what matters. That's gerrymandering. And we see that when it comes to Congress, we see that in our state legislatures, we see that in our school districts, right? Our city councils, right? The process of

drawing these kinds of district lines happens in all kinds of bodies. And what ends up happening is that, you know, over the years, and it has become as bad as it's ever been, this has been a tool of depriving certain voters, again, especially non-white voters, especially on top of that black voters, of political power. So how does that work? What ends up happening is you have these redistricting processes that are supposed to happen on a set calendar. And there are certain protections that actually exist in the law against gerrymandering. You're not supposed to be able, for instance, to draw lines in such a way that denies voters of color the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. So there's a certain framework you've got to work in, right? The stuff that we're seeing now builds on decades of law and policy work. And in many ways, it's a game of cat and mouse. North Carolina was in the 2010s,

was one of a wave of states where advances in technology and sort of the dropping of a lot of pretense led to really stark distortion between the districts that were created, again, for Congress and state legislatures, and the will of the voters. So I'll give you an example. There are two kinds of things you sometimes hear about. One is called cracking, and the other is called packing. I was going to ask you about this, please. So packing is the idea that says, OK, the law, the law says you've got to make sure that, you know, Latino voters in this part of my state are able to elect their candidates of choice. So let's draw the line in this weird snake shape so that we're, and, you know, it's taking people from five

different parts of five different towns and we're saying, okay, you all get to vote for your candidate of choice. Around the Latino areas. Right, exactly. And so they'll take people that aren't necessarily a part of the same, you know, geographic or, you know, other kind of committee, pull them together on the basis of that and say, hey, look, we're complying with the law. But what they're doing is if they had drawn the lines in a different way, those people could have had a choice in electing candidates in three districts instead of one. Yeah.

Crashing. You take all of the Latino, Latinx people, you put them in one district, and then they get to basically elect one state representative or council member or house representative, whatever it is, which ends up being a vast minority in the state or national legislature. And then, all right, so you've got your representative representative but they can't actually get anything done you've ensured like permanent majority for uh if you if you if it if it works that way exactly so it's one way of diluting actual political power right yeah the other way that that we see is called cracking and there's a pretty uh famous and telling example from the last decade in north carolina there is an historically black university, North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, which is one of the bigger cities in the state, and an historic school. And the way in one of the maps, again, that was eventually thrown out,

the congressional districts were drawn such that the line between two congressional districts went right through the middle of the North Carolina A&T campus. Wow. So that the black students in North Carolina A&T could not pool their votes in such a way to influence an election in a single district. Right. So it's OK, we're going to take there's all these black students together and we're going to split them up. Right. So it's OK, we're going to take there's all these black students together and we're going to split them up. So now they're in two different districts and there's not going to be enough of them to influence in this wider district that we've like sort of diluted them in. Yeah. And so and so what you end up seeing are things right where you end up seeing you'll look statewide and you'll say, well, I think, you know, North Carolina, we had something close to, we've had over the past few cycles, something close to 50-50 outcomes in terms of state

legislative races, in terms of the number of votes candidates get. But then you see that 50-50 outcome, but a clear Republican majority. Right. Right. You know, it's even more stark, right, in a place like Wisconsin. There have been instances where there are, you know, a sub 50 percent vote total still leads to a over 50 percent majority in terms of the number of seats that are there. And that swings not just individual seats, but whole chambers and then policy outcomes for years to come. Yeah. Which, by the way, then depending on how the state does its redistricting means that that party is able to redistrict the next time and maintain that power imbalance almost indefinitely. And there are states in which Democrats have also gerrymandered. Want to be clear about that. But like, so what is the what is the solution to this? I mean, if it's if it's not, by the way, I'm sorry.

What is the solution is asking you to like answer a very complex problem with a very simple answer. What I'm trying to say is what is the fair way to district? If you're saying that, okay, it's bad to pack minority folks all into one district. So they only get to elect one person, but it's also bad to split that district up to dilute the vote. Because then you're able to, you know, minimize the amount of say they have. Okay. Let's just make sure that we have a very small minority in a bunch of different districts of people of color or of really any group like that.

By the way, this can also be done. Gerrymandering can also be done to white people as well. You could do it to a bunch of white people from one party and say, okay, this, this college town, which is full of white people is, you know,, okay, this college town, which is full of white people,

is, you know, very progressive, or this area is very conservative. Let's pack or crack that. What is a fair principle on which to district? What do you advocate? Yeah. So I would say, you know, number one, you're right, that sort of abusing the redistricting system is something we have seen across the political spectrum historically. And it happens that because of political outcomes that we've seen in the last decade that we've seen a lot more of this abuse in recent years on the right than on the left. And at a higher level of extremity in part because of these advances in technology. In many ways, you're looking at an imperfect issue, and you're not going to have

a totally perfect solution. But when I look at redistricting, and a lot of folks who look at this would say the same thing, right, that the core issue is that you can't reconcile the fact that the same people who draw the lines are the same people who then run for office on those same lines. And the most promising solutions that we've seen have been through independent redistricting systems, right? So that's actually something that exists in California, in Arizona, in a number of states. And the, you know, the path forward then, right, is to create systems where you're separating legislators from their own mask being drawn. I mean, it's like letting, you know,

it's that old fox in the hen house kind of thing. Yeah, this is very straightforward. It's like, what if you were playing a basketball game and the ref is on one of the teams? That's exactly right. That team is going to win. You need the game to be refereed by someone who's

independent or maybe it's hard to say, all right, let's find someone in America who isn't a Republican or a Democrat but is truly independent. Well, you could have a committee made up of, I assume, equal members of equal parties. There's various schemes you can do to come up with. And different states are trying different things, right? Yeah. Fully independent, independent with a legislature. You know, in North Carolina, we think what, you know, the position we've taken is to say, hey, we want to have one of

these independent redistricting systems, right? We want to take this completely out of the legislature's hands and to be able to say, let's have an independent body do it and let the legislature handle the business of legislating. So that's where we are on that. But there are, I think when people look at it, they also say, well, why can't we just pass a law about it? I think when people look at it, they also say, well, why can't we just pass a law about it? And, you know, it's because different states all do this in a different way. And changing the law on this in different states can be very different. So some of the states you have to change the Constitution. And what it means to change the Constitution in one state can be very different from one state to the next. And so it really is a patchwork, right?

from one state to the next. And so it really is a patchwork, right? We've got 50 states and we've got 50 different ways in which we have to address at least the state level redistricting. Addressing congressional redistricting is something that the federal government could do. Yeah.

And what's unfortunate is that, so my understanding is that racial gerrymandering is illegal, but partisan gerrymandering, you can say we're redistricting in order to favor Republicans. That is not illegal yet. And the Supreme Court had an opportunity to make it illegal and they they punted and then Anthony Kennedy retired. And now it's not going to happen, is my understanding. Am I right? You more or less nailed it. I mean, I think

so in North Carolina, we actually had a a prominent legislator who was involved in redistricting say, we are drawing these maps, you know, not with any kind of racial animus in mind. And the exact words he used was, you know, we have drawn these maps, you know, to achieve. It was something like 10 Republican members of Congress and three Democrats. And the reason we did that is because we couldn't get to 11 and 2. Yeah, you can't get more blunt than that. Yeah. And he said that to try to say there's nothing in the law against partisan gerrymandering. We're not discriminating against black people. We're discriminating against Democrats and there's nothing against the law in doing that.

And in fact, what the U.S. Supreme Court has said, right, is that gerrymandering is a really big problem, but in their judgment, right, partisan gerrymandering is not something barred by the U.S. Constitution. And so now where the fight has gone is to the states and to these state courts. So now where the fight has gone is to the states and to these state courts. You know, it's only recently, a couple of years ago, the state of Pennsylvania said, in fact, partisan gerrymandering in that state doesn't fly. There was a court ruling here in North Carolina. It was a lower court ruling, but it said, you're partisan gerrymander. We're tossing it. You got to try something new.

And so that remains a live issue, although, again, not currently at the U.S. Supreme Court. But this is something that even at the states, many politicians are still fighting. I mean, there is there was a referendum in Michigan, I believe, to end partisan gerrymandering and to do, I believe, an independent commission. And that won. But it's still very contentious. I think in Arizona was the state where like politicians took their own voters to court in order to like still be able to partisan gerrymander. I don't want to get it wrong. Carolina, I worked on, you know, it's called an amicus brief, right? So I wasn't directly involved in the case, but we were involved a little, you know, sort of on the side of that, of the Independent Redistricting Commission in Arizona, right? That Arizona's own legislature, this was, you know, back earlier in the decade, sued Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission under the theory that, you know, that independent redistricting commissions were unconstitutional. And at the U.S. Supreme Court

said, this is totally fine. And so good job of the U.S. Supreme Court at the time. And, you know, they were really, you know, trying to work on a really strict definition of the word legislature. It was, you know, you could really sort of nerd out, go down a whole rabbit hole down that. But suffice it to say that was upheld then, but that was also a different court than we have now. And, you know, I think over the next few years, I think we're going to continue to see a lot of these fights continue, not just legislatively, right, but in the courts too. Yeah. Well, before I move to what like on the ground your group does, I still just have this larger question about how

politics works, because it seems to me the more I learned about politics, as I was saying earlier, there is a degree to which all politics is working within the electoral system, like, like, you know, changing how the electoral system works in order to win your outcome. And that's true in elections. It's also true in the legislative bodies. Read a big book about, read Robert Caro's big biography of LBJ

when he ran the Senate. How did he run it? It's by controlling who's in the room when the bill comes up for a vote, right? It's saying, okay, I'm gonna do this during recess or I'm gonna do this late at night when the oldest guy is asleep and won't be able to, you know, it's like all of these, all the, like, this is how politics is done. It's looking at, you know, the rules of the game and saying, how do I position what I'm doing within those rules? And how do I

change the rules if I'm able to, in order to win political power. It seems somehow fundamental to the operations of politics, yet your organization and I would feel I join you in that, want there to be sort of like universal principles as to how we run these things. And those do seem to be in conflict a little bit. Like the reality of how politics is done, to a certain extent,

I can't fault politicians for wanting to operate this way because that's fucking politics. That's how you win. So how do you square those two things? I mean, for one thing, right, you said it yourself, right, that the practice of politics

from the politician's perspective is not the same thing as the practice of politics from the politician's perspective is not the same thing as the practice of politics from the individual citizen's perspective or the community's perspective, right? That, you know, what is happening in the legislature, you know, those are sort of operational machinations, right? That's one thing. What we're trying to do is make sure that when those folks are operating, and when other people who are decision makers are operating, right? That's one thing. What we are trying to do is make sure that when those folks are operating, and when other people who are decision makers are operating, right,

whether they're in the legislative branches or the executive branch or wherever else, that the community voice is actually being heard. What has happened in recent years especially has been such a dramatic distortion because of gerrymandering, because of the structural voting stuff that we were talking about earlier, right? That you don't have the relationship between what's going on in, you know, under the dome at the U.S. Capitol or in state capitals across the country and the communities that are supposed to be being represented. And so we've got to build that relationship back up. And, you know, that involves a whole process of building power, like you say, electorally, but also using that power to achieve structural change that's needed in order to retain it. So you've got to reverse this whole cycle that we've been subject to.

we've been subject to. Yeah. Like there's still, there's, there's a way to let them operate as you say, and, and not violate like our fundamental principles of Americans should have a say in their government. Yeah. Well, tell me about what your organization does. You said you have your helpline that helps people yeah what what are your like actual on the ground initiatives so the actual on the ground stuff democracy north carolina does right one thing we are doing research and writing uh that is helping to shape the debate in north carolina around all these election and redistricting and money and politics issues right so we try to be the experts on the ground to be a bridge, not just to the people who are making policy over in the state capital,

but at the community level to understand what the impact is, right? So there's that layer of like structural expertise. Second thing is, you know, our team is spread across the state of North Carolina and is working in communities across North Carolina to make sure that we're not just, you know, you get a lot of people that this takes you kind of to a broader vision of politics right outside of like what happens in government. But, you know, there are some visions of change that are based on, you know, just the thing I just mentioned. Let the experts cook and you'll get the results. We don't think that's 100% of the answer. The experts can cook,

but you need to make sure that the people actually have a say. And what the experts are thinking about is actually reflecting what community needs are. And so what that looks like in practice is grassroots organizing, building relationships across the state, working with churches, local civic organizations, and putting people in a position to use the political process the way they want to use it. So one example of this is, we've got a whole set of rules in North Carolina that allow the public an opportunity to potentially influence where voting happens. And one of the things we've been working to do over the last several cycles, including in the most recent cycle, is to train people, partner with other groups across the state, especially local groups,

and put them in a position to advocate, you know, with their local election officials or local county boards of elections to say, hey, we want to make sure voting is at the community center and not just at the country club. We want to make sure that there's a polling site on the college campus, and that the polling site on the college campus is something students can actually reach. And that we have, during our early voting period, not just voting during the week, but on Saturdays and Sundays for people who work during the week. And so doing that kind of work, for people who work during the week. And so doing that kind of work, right,

sort of bridging the structural need with the actual on-the-ground practice is really kind of what we're trying to do. And again, we don't get involved in political campaigns per se, right? But what we do get involved in is trying to make sure that the barriers to voting are as low as possible. Yeah. And then whatever the barriers are that we help people overcome them. Right. Helping to get

out the vote, putting people in, you know, training folks on, OK, here's how you make that phone call to persuade someone to, you know, be able to take a vote for the first time. Yeah. So doing that work as well. So that's incredible work. And there's so much of that that can be done on the ground and is so incredibly important to do. And I think it makes a huge difference in an election system when you have groups like yours that are out there doing that. There are places, many places. I mean, you know, here where I am in LA, I don't know about an organization like yours. That is, I mean, there are organizations doing this, but, you know, here where I am in LA, I don't know about an organization like yours. That is, that is, I mean, there are organizations doing, doing this, but you know, maybe not on as wide a scale. But when you need the participation of the political system, how do you go about getting

that? Like, just to give you one more example of how impactful this shit can be. Like again, here in our city elections in LA, we had a really big seat change on, you know, in in the November election where a bunch of old folks are swept out of power and a bunch of new politicians were swept in. And the biggest reason for that was they rescheduled the elections. Previously, our elections in the city had been held in the off off years, like not the presidential election and not the congressional election, but the middle, the one between that, like the election, nobody votes in the time, the elections where you're like, there's an election today. I didn't even hear about it. And as a result, people didn't even know about these offices. And for some reason, this is before I moved to the city. So I don't know why, for some reason, they, the city decided let's move the election and make it

align with the national presidential election. And as a result, literally like five times as many people voted in these races as did previously. And as a result, a bunch of the politicians lost their fucking jobs. And so I don't know why they voted for this, because it was in their interest. These are all people who got elected by the by, by you know the the oldsters who vote in every single election the retirement communities who the people have got nothing better to do you know uh the next door types the sort of like real local wonks um and like they were basically elected by the crank population um and it would have been there in their best interest to keep

it that way because that's what got them elected but instead instead, for some reason, they decided to open it up massively and that changed the political climate in the city in what I think is a massively beneficial way. Suddenly people know the name of their city council person and they give a shit about it and they're talking about it. And wow, that's so cool. But how do you get the politicians

who need to vote in order to make such a change happen? How do you get them to go along with it? Some of it's a question of accountability, right? So we've got, and this is where, you know, there's a whole ecosystem that we're a part of, right? You know, there are community organizations, statewide organizations, folks that are going to be able to say, look, this is a priority for us. We helped put you in office and we have expectations, right? So it's about, you know, what, what is being done, right? That's the power of organizing, right? That if you get enough people together to say, yes, this is the thing we want, and we are going to be concerted in,

in clearly communicating that and underscoring the stakes, that's how change can start to happen, right? And it takes different angles for different folks to achieve that right block by block, right? There's going to be some member of the, there's going to be some legislator that's persuaded by the memo that our policy people wrote. There's going to be some other person that's going to be persuaded by, you know, the narratives from, you know, somebody within their district. And the, you know, so it's not a one size fits all, but you've got to apply all those different tools to achieve that outcome. And that, you know, that's effectively, right, organizing and advocacy. Yeah, that's a very good answer. Have you had success doing that? You know, in some ways, the last 10 years have been hard, right, in achieving changes. And yet

one thing that I point and I think about from last year, actually, that I feel, you know, that I think was, you know, frankly, kind of surprising was we were able to get some changes into North Carolina law just for the 2020 election in the pandemic context that made absentee voting more accessible, that relaxed some of the rules around who gets to be a poll worker. And those are things that help contribute to the 75% turnout we got last fall. Wow. That's a huge turnout. Yeah, we had a huge turnout here. And the changes that were made to absentee voting, and now we got to have a whole new fight about trying to keep these things in place, right?

Yeah. But the changes that were made, right, we went from having to have two witnesses for an absentee ballot to one. Still not ideal, but two beats one. In our primary, with the two-witness requirement in place, it was something around 86% of absentee ballots that people submitted were accepted. So you had a pretty high rejection rate. And if you extrapolate that to the amount of absentee ballots we'd see in the general election you get into a pretty seriously high number you're usually greater than the margin of statewide race that number lowered you know but you have uh when you had one witness last fall the number of absentee ballots that were submitted and accepted was in the high 90s that's a way higher number and that and that helped to avoid a really bad scenario so you you know that's a way higher number and that have and that helped to avoid a really bad scenario

so you you know that's that that is one you know kind of near-term you know success story that we feel good about and then the other thing that we point to is the fact that last year right we had people working across the state you know trying to get their their communities to create you know to have good early voting hours and at the same time, there were also groups, one of which, we were involved in one of these lawsuits that was also litigating against the state of North Carolina on some of these issues. Those pressures coming together, the end result of it was a 79% increase in the amount of hours that people were available to vote early than compared to 2016. And that was effectively, you know, formally right through an emergency order that the state issued, you know, using

their emergency powers. But that doesn't happen without public pressure. It doesn't happen without people stepping up to say, this is something we need. You know, so I think those are two outcomes I point to from, you know, just the last year. What is, like, can you paint a picture for me of if we are able to get the kind of election access that you've been working for? Like, how does that change our communities in a positive way? Do you have a vision of that? Yeah, I mean, I think the idea, right, is you have these things that are in relationship with each other, right? You know, it's the voting access, but it's also people using that access. And it's also people using that access to get the things they want. And if they work the way they should, it creates kind of a virtuous cycle, right?

We've opened up voting access. Okay, we're getting more people involved in voting. Okay, all these people that are now involved in voting, right, they also have an increased, you know, because of work that we know there's been doing on, you know, sort of organizing and training. They have an increased capacity to advocate for the things that they want, whether it's a housing issue or an education issue, whatever the case may be. And then they're able to achieve that outcome and they're able to achieve more reform. Right. So it's really, you know, we want to achieve these structural changes, not just because they're nice, but because they're in service and trying to build and distribute power. Yeah. Yeah. It's if people have that experience of people are so cynical, you know, about and

justifiably so people have been let down by the political system. People feel the political system doesn't represent them. But if they've had the experience of voting being easier and better and then they elect somebody who they feel represents them for the first time. And then that person does something that benefits them or they vote for a referendum issue. They vote for a ballot initiative. They vote for a referendum issue, they vote for a ballot initiative, they vote for anything, and then that improves their community in some measurable way that they,

not even measurable way, in a way that feels real to them, then they're going to participate more, and then we're going to actually have a fucking democracy. Right, that's the goal. How can people take part in this work, both in North Carolina, where I think it's very important as a state where these issues are being, you know, contemporarily fought over, but also in their own communities. I mean, again, this is not an issue

that we think about being here in California where I live. Yet there have been such massive changes over the last few years and there are more changes that need to happen. So how do you suggest people get involved in this? So in the very broad sense, right, we'll get to North Carolina because that's, well, I'll start with North Carolina. It's a short answer, right? You can visit our website, democracync.org. You got lots of ways to plug in, but wherever, wherever you live, right, there is a set of people who you might think of as busy bodies, who you might think of as the annoying people who don't keep to themselves. I know because actually outside of the work context, I'm often like, oh, my gosh, why is someone bothering me? So I understand that you might feel I don't have time for this or why don't you do something?

You there is somebody that is working on something and it doesn't need to be as big as, you know, we need to swing the whole election. Right. It might be something as small as, you know, I want to build a park or I want the park that's near me that to be, you know, cleaned up or I want, you know, whatever the thing is. And to really get down to the question of how do you find it, right? Sometimes, you know, it's the cranks on next door, right? Some of those cranks on next door might be people you actually agree with, who you might be able to find, ranks on next door might be people you actually agree with, who you might be able to find, you know, you know, find common cause with. Sometimes it is, you know, locating, you know, your local organization. I think about, you know, we often work with groups like the NAACP, right? The League of Women Voters. Yeah. You know, sort of chapters of, you know,

sort of longstanding organizations that are active in a community. You know, for those who are a member of a faith community, right? We've, you know, we've been able to achieve a lot through communities of worship, if that's, you know, if that's your thing. But all it takes is a group of organized people. You know, there are, and it's hard to say, well, I would love to be able to say, okay, in Los Angeles, go talk to this person. In Seattle, go talk to this person. in Los Angeles, go talk to this person, and Seattle, go talk to this person, New York, go talk to this person. But what you can find without a whole lot of research, right, is seeing, okay, who, you know, who is doing the thinking on

this and who's doing the moving on this? And it doesn't take, you know, a fancy degree. It doesn't take, you know, a high level of expertise. What it takes is your knowledge, your experience, your willingness to work. Yeah. And you can find that, you know, in others. I know it might be a little, that might be a little vague because I feel like, you know, I think what people probably really want is like, you know, a place that they can go right away. But I think, I think the answer, right, is, is to, is to surface the things immediately around you. Yeah. Well, look for the people who are showing up in your area and then say, Hey, can I show up too? Well, I think the league of women voters is a perfect example. There are a league of women voters chapters all over the country.

And like, you can go to a meeting and if you go to a league of women voters meeting, you know, you'll probably, you'll probably meet a couple of retirees who just like going to meetings. There are those people at all these things, but you'll probably also meet someone who is really, really working hard to fix things in your community. And, you know, you say, Hey, where, what, what else are you a member of? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. You know, you say, hey, what else are you a member of? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.

Yeah. Start going to those things. They're, you know, here in LA, we have neighborhood council meetings, which are these almost powerless little local bodies that, you know, have endless committee meetings. And I don't really go to these meetings because they are interminable. But I do talk to the people who do go to them, and they are some of the best people I've met in Los Angeles. Like, and I say, Hey, what else do you do? And can I, can I help you out in some other way other than going to this one meeting that I don't personally care for? You know, like there are those people in every community and you don't need to be a special type of person to be one of them. You can just start showing up. And once you start showing up,

oh my gosh, the world of your community will open up to you. Yeah, that's exactly right. I couldn't say it better myself. I mean, you know, politics is about people coming together to achieve something that they all want to achieve together.

Yeah. Oh, it's so cool when it, when it happens. You're making me excited right now to get out, to get out and, and not just vote, but to like participate to one of the things that made me so happy about the last election was how many friends of mine, uh,

signed up to be poll workers, you know, and, and just that, like, I'm going to go be a poll worker. And that is, you can vote, but you can do those things too, you know, or you can go be a door knocker or you can, uh, you know, be someone who calls, you know, does phone banking to call people and say, do you know where to vote? Do you know how to register to vote? Just that much is like so meaningful. It's amazing. And poll workers, that is a thankless job. And we had a real need last year because of the pandemic to address gaps in poll workers.

And people really stepped up. I mean, that's another big win from this last election. Yeah. Well, Tomas, thank you so much for the work that you do. And thank you so much for coming on to tell us about it. It has been amazing to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you once again to Tomas Lopez for coming on the show.

If you'd like to check out the work of Democracy North Carolina, you can find them at democracync.org. And hey, once again, if you want to support the show, buy one of our guest's books at factuallypod.com slash books. Tell a friend or family member about the show and send me an email at factually at adamconover.net. factually at adamconover.net and let me know whether you'd be interested in supporting the show directly and on what platform you'd like to do that, whether that be Patreon, Spotify, or Apple. Would love to hear from you.

I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Until next week, we will see you on Factually. Thank you so much for listening.

That was a HeadGum Podcast.