Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The History of Gerrymandering with Nick Seabrook

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

In this episode, Sharon chats with Professor Nick Seabrook, who has written a new book, One Person, One Voice, that details the long history of gerrymandering in the United States. While gerrymandering predates our country, Professor Seabrook argues that it’s a bigger problem today than it has been in the past because we have more sophisticated access to data and technology. This access has flipped the script, and politicians are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. Join the conversation as Sharon and Professor Seabrook talk about how we got here--the myths, the history, and what we can do to slow this threat to democracy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the Level up sales event today at canon.ca. Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you here as always. And today we are talking about something that is truly very detrimental to our democracy, something that we should be paying attention to, and that is the topic of gerrymandering. I have a guest who has written a phenomenal book about the history of gerrymandering in the United States, which by the way, you're going to find out is a uniquely American problem. So I have Nick Seabrook with me today.

Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon. And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I'm very excited to talk about this topic because this is something that y'all have been telling me that you want to know more about, you want the history of, and you also want to know what we can do about it. So thank you, Nick, for joining me today. Thank you. It's great to be here. I would love for you to just give listeners a little overview of how you became interested in this topic and

how you even set out to write sort of a definitive work on this. Sure. So my day job is that I am a professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. And I've been doing that for about 12 years now. And I would say that my desire to write this book was motivated partly by just a general interest in civic engagement in education. I do quite a bit of work with the Florida Department of Education as part of their civic literacy initiative, which really tries to kind of prepare the next generation of democratic citizens to ensure that everyone who's graduating out of our public K-12 schools here in Florida and our public universities has kind of the knowledge and the tools to be a good democratic citizen. And I would say that my interest in this topic

has also been inspired by my own experience as an immigrant to the United States. I'm one of those professors who kind of ended up in this job because I went to college and I liked it so much that I never left. And eventually I ran out of degrees that I could earn and decided to apply for teaching jobs. But at the same time, I've also been going through the process of civic engagement, the importance of people voting in elections as just the baseline, but also just being interested in politics, keeping an eye on what's going on in their communities, because that's really the only way that elected representatives can be held accountable for what they do. And we can ensure that the policies that they put in place reflect what we want as citizens. And there's really a sore lack of that, I think, in American government right now for a variety of reasons. But I think gerrymandering is one of the

reasons why our government is so dysfunctional. And that kind of inspired me to dive into the history of this topic. I discovered that gerrymandering is older than the United States itself. It's been going on throughout our history. But I also discovered that it's a bigger problem today than it's ever really been before, because the latest generation of politicians have access to all of this sophisticated data on where people live, who they tend to vote for. And they also have access to this really sophisticated technology that they can use to kind of simulate how districts will perform under a variety of conditions. And that allows them to draw the districts in a way that ensures a particular political outcome. And that's not how things are supposed to work. The voters are supposed to choose the politicians. The politicians are not

supposed to choose the voters. But far too often, that's what's happening in the United States today. That is, I really like that. The voters are supposed to choose the politicians. The politicians are not supposed to choose the voters. Such an interesting point too about gerrymandering that we have gotten really good at doing it. We've gotten much better at doing it because we now have access to so much individual information about what are the statistics of who lives on this street. And a lot of that information, I would imagine, comes from information that we either willingly or unwittingly give up via our technology use. Is that accurate? Right. And so for most of US history,

pretty much the only data source that politicians had to draw from when it came to gerrymandering was the census results. We've had the census going back all the way to the founding. And then they would just kind of look at what happened in the last election. And a lot of those historical gerrymanders were pretty amateurish by today's standards. They kind of made their best guess at what might happen if they drew the districts in a certain way. Sometimes they were right, but more often than not, they were wrong. But the politicians today, they don't just have the census data, they have access to incredibly detailed survey data, and they have access to the benefits of just

general big data that's being collected on us all the time and is really revealing of our preferences. And so they can really finely tune the gerrymander today to a degree that has never before been possible. And that's why I think this is such a significant threat to our democracy today, even though it's always been with us. The challenges that it presents in the modern kind of data-rich environment are a very different kind from what we've seen going back in U.S. history. People always wonder, where did the word gerrymander even come from? And we can trace it directly back to one individual and his desire to sort of draw a very oddly shaped political map. Could you start us at the very beginning of how gerrymandering began? Right, well, so this is

going to be one of those brain tingles that I know you're fond of, because one of the things that I discovered when researching this book is that almost everything that we think we know about the origin of gerrymandering is wrong. back in early 19th century Massachusetts. It turns out that his name was actually pronounced Gary with a hard G rather than Jerry. And in fact, for about the first 50 or 60 years after that, the practice was known as Garymandering rather than gerrymandering. And the myth is that this guy, Elbridge Gary, and I always find myself wanting to call him Jerry, just because I read his name for about a decade before I even know how it was pronounced. But the popular notion is that he invented the gerrymander, that he was the governor of Massachusetts at the time, and he was a Democratic Republican. His opponents were the Federalists. And he decided that he was going to draw the boundaries of the state Senate in such a way that would rig the results in favor of his political party.

And the origin of the term comes from a cartoon. And if you Google gerrymandering cartoon, it's the first thing that will come up that was published in the Boston Gazette, which was one of the major newspapers. And the idea was that the most distorted district in the plan that was put in place in Massachusetts kind of looked like a salamander. You have to squint a little bit to see the resemblance, but one of the cartoonists at the newspaper kind of drew a cartoon salamander on top of the map. And that was the origin of the term gerrymander or gerrymander as it happened at the time. But it turns out that he was really not very much involved in the creation of the map that ultimately

created his infamy. And it's kind of a shame that this is the thing that he is remembered for today, because he went on to serve as Vice President of the United States under James Madison. So he had a pretty distinguished career. He was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention. If he had been a younger man, he may have ended up getting elected president, but he passed away while he was serving in the James Madison administration. And it turns out that he really wasn't all that much involved in the whole process. In fact, it was members of his party in the state legislature who had put together this gerrymander. gerrymander. And he had just kind of signed it to get it out of the way. He wasn't particularly on board. He wasn't really invested in it. It wasn't something that he was particularly responsible for. And yet he has gone down in U.S. history as the so-called creator of the gerrymander. Additionally, it turns out that the kind of eponymous first gerrymander was not by any means the first time that gerrymandering had occurred in U.S. history. And so it really is a misnomer that this is the way

that it's been commemorated in U.S. history. And so part of what I tried to do in the book is kind of dispel some of these myths about the history and the origins of the gerrymander. Hmm. Do other countries use gerrymandering? I assume it's called something different there, but is this a uniquely American problem? It is almost entirely a uniquely American problem today. Oh great, perfect, perfect. Really the only other nation that has a comparable problem with gerrymandering, although even there it's not as severe as it is in the US, is in fact France. Because France is really the only other country that allows politicians to control the drawing of districts that those politicians will then contest the

elections. And obviously that creates some really perverse incentives for them to use that control to try and give their side an edge or to protect the incumbents from their political party. away from politicians, to have some kind of commission, some kind of nonpartisan government agency, some kind of body that is insulated from political influence, and that can draw districts in a way that is not susceptible to those kinds of perverse incentives. And what I really took out of all of the research and writing that I did for this book is that the number one problem is simply the fact that it is politicians who are doing this. And when you take politicians out of the equation, you're not going to get a fair map every time, but you're going to get a process that is a lot more reflective of the people rather than the interests of the people who are in power. Give us a little bit of a taste moving forward as we move sort of out of this colonial period and into early American history, into the early

19th century. What did gerrymandering look like during that time? So I think there are probably two 19th century gerrymandering stories that are particularly interesting. They involved people who went on to become president of the United States. And the first of those was James Madison. James Madison, obviously from Virginia. And he had a long running feud along with his ally Thomas Jefferson, with Patrick Henry, who was one of the most influential figures in Virginia politics at the time. And Jefferson and Madison were both supporters of the Constitution, whereas Patrick Henry was an opponent. He had famously declined to be a delegate to the convention in Philadelphia because he said that he smelt a rat tending towards monarchy. And so once the constitution

was ratified, Henry kind of made it his project to try and push for a second convention to really radically revise the text. And part of the way that he went about doing this was to try and prevent James Madison from winning election to the House of Representatives. And this is one of the very earliest examples of American gerrymandering. It happened more than a decade before the original, quote unquote, original gerrymander in Massachusetts. And so he went about drawing a district that he thought would be challenging for James Madison. And he also recruited the biggest heavyweight he could find to run against Madison in that district. And that turned out to be James Monroe. This is the only time in US history that two future presidents have run against each other for a single seat

in Congress. But Henry was really lacking in terms of data on the district populations. He made a good faith effort to try and prevent Madison from getting elected to Congress. Ultimately, he was unsuccessful. Madison won the election. And then when he got to Congress, he introduced the Bill of Rights. Obviously, the Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of American liberty, and that really short circuited Henry's plan to call for a second constitutional convention and kind of safeguarded the early republic. So you can imagine if things had gone a little bit differently, if he'd been successful at keeping Madison out of Congress, how differently U.S. history might have played out if we didn't get the Bill of Rights in such a timely fashion? Secondly, would somebody else have written it? And would they have had a different perspective on what to include?

Right. And Madison wouldn't have been there. And of course, the Bill of Rights was very much Madison's brainchild. He wrote all of the original amendments. Congress debated and then decided which ones they wanted to include in the Constitution. But without Madison, as you said, who is the figure who steps up? And how different do those rights look if it's someone else who's kind of driving the car at that crucial moment in U.S. history? And a lot of people don't realize that there were more amendments that he had introduced. And we think it's just like, it's just these 10 and that's what it is. And Congress actually chose which ones it wanted to

include. Right. That Madison had put together, and I'm forgetting the number off the top of my head, but it was something like 17 amendments that he had originally proposed. And those then kind of got whittled down into what eventually became the Bill of Rights. You said there was a second sort of notable gerrymander attempt. Right. So this one takes place in the 1850s. So in the lead up to the Civil War, and it happens in the state of Illinois. And that might give you a clue as to which future president this might involve. But in 1850, the Democrats were in control of the state legislature in Springfield. But the kind of upstart rising Republican Party, one of whose kind of talented young

politicians was a guy by the name of Abraham Lincoln, was really starting to gain a foothold in the state. And so what the Democrats did in 1850 was to draw the districts for the Illinois state legislature in a way that would ensure that they could kind of cling to control for as long as possible, that the Republicans were kind of surging in the election results, but they configured the districts in such a way that they could keep their majority. And then eight years later, Abraham Lincoln decides that he's going to run for the US Senate. And this, of course, was at the time in US history, where senators were not elected by the people of the state, as they are today, senators were chosen by the state legislature. So this was the campaign in

which Lincoln delivered his famous speech, where he said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. And Lincoln's opponent in that election was Stephen A. Douglas, who would two years later also run against him for president of the United States. And the election is remembered for the famous Lincoln Douglas debates, kind of the classic example of great debates between politicians in US history. But the problem was that for Lincoln to get elected, he would have to persuade the state legislature to appoint him. And because of the gerrymander from 1850, the Democrats still controlled the state legislature in Springfield, and that majority chose Stephen A. Douglas over Lincoln for the Senate. Lincoln for the Senate. Without that gerrymander, it's entirely possible that Lincoln would have won a Senate seat in 1858. And would he have still run for president two years later if he had been right at the beginning of a Senate term? Possibly. But this is kind of another point in U.S. history

where gerrymandering kind of fundamentally impacted not just the career of someone who went on to become one of our greatest presidents, but kind of a pivotal moment in the lead up to the Civil War as well. That's so interesting. Another thing you can think about is like how if he had gotten elected to the Senate, had not become president because he felt like he wanted to serve his state for six years, would the Civil War have happened when it did? Would it have happened in the way that it did? Would Abraham Lincoln have been assassinated? You know, like you could just think of a million ways that the future of America could have been impacted, just like spread out times a million of like, this could have happened, this could have happened,

if the outcome of that election had been different. Right. There are all kinds of things that might have worked out differently. And it turns out, speaking of Lincoln's assassination, that the man who replaced him as president, Andrew Johnson, was also affected by gerrymandering earlier in his career back when he was in Tennessee. And is still regarded by historians as one of the worst presidents. Yes. How differently would Reconstruction and Jim Crow have looked if Abraham Lincoln had not chosen him? And you can look at, you know, like, yes, he was going for country unity. It was unusual.

Choose somebody from the other side so we can show we're all in this together. But how different the country would have looked if he had chosen somebody better equipped to handle what the country had just gone through. Right. And of course, the conflict with the Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction was what eventually led to Johnson being impeached. And his impeachment failed by a single vote in the Senate. They were one vote away from removing him from office. This is another story that I talk about in the book. But one of the main reasons why Johnson survived that impeachment, even though there were enough Republicans in the Senate to remove him on a party line vote, was that the guy who was scheduled to replace him if he had been removed from office was incredibly unpopular. He

was a Republican senator by the name of Benjamin Wade, who is not a name that most people know, but he's someone who came within a single vote in the Senate of succeeding Andrew Johnson as president. And this is what really kind of fascinates me about delving into these historical stories and focusing on all of the kind of incidental events and all of the interesting characters and their lives and how their careers intersected with gerrymandering is that you see all of these points in U.S. history where things could have gone just slightly differently. And I'm always fascinated by kind of alternate history of thinking about, well, if this had happened slightly differently, what might have been the effects on our nation? And I really highlight a lot of those kind of crucial

decision points or points of convergence in U.S. history and how, more often than not, gerrymandering factored in in some way to those stories. Hey, Torontonians. Recycling is more than a routine. It's a vital responsibility. By recycling properly, you help conserve resources, reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and protect the environment. Toronto's Blue Bin Recycling Program ensures the majority of the right items are recovered and transformed into new products. Recycling right is important and impactful. Let's work together and make a difference, because small actions lead to big change. For more tips on recycling, visit toronto.ca slash recycle right.

I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm angela kinsey we are best friends and together we have the podcast office ladies where we re-watched every single episode of the office with insane behind the scenes stories hilarious guests and lots of laughs yes who's sitting next to me ste girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink.

every Wednesday. Plus on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I would love to hear about any examples you might have of how gerrymandering has affected the United States moving into sort of the more modern era, maybe surrounding things like the 2000 presidential election, for example, or other elections of consequence. Okay, so we haven't really talked in detail about what exactly gerrymandering is and how it works. We've kind of danced around the topic. So maybe if I give kind of like a hypothetical that will illustrate how gerrymandering is accomplished. So I live in the city of Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville is one of the most evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, major cities

in the United States. It's pretty much 50-50 Democrat and Republican. It voted for Donald Trump in 2016, voted for Joe Biden in 2020. It's kind of a swing county in a swing state. So let's imagine that you're the state legislature in Tallahassee, and you're drawing districts in Jacksonville, and you need to divide the city into three individual districts to elect representatives to the legislature. The way that you would think that would work is that in an evenly divided city, the districts would be pretty competitive, that you would have

maybe one of them is 55-45, but they're going to be close enough that the people have meaningful input into who represents them. If the Democrats do really well in one year, maybe they win all three seats in Jacksonville. If it's a little closer, maybe it goes two to one. But the districts are competitive enough that it makes a difference how people vote. It makes a difference who gets nominated, whether they're someone who's more mainstream or someone who's more of a fringe kind of extreme candidate. It makes a difference how good of a campaign they run and how well they connect with the voters in their district.

That's kind of the model of how things should theoretically work in a representative democracy. Now let's imagine what a gerrymander would look like in that situation. So instead of drawing three competitive districts, let's say you're the Republicans in Tallahassee. Instead, you pack as many Democrats as you can into one of those three seats, and you create a district that has 80% Democrats and 20% Republicans. And then in the other two districts, you draw them so that they have 65% Republicans and 35% Democrats. Suddenly, the people no longer have much of a meaningful input into who represents them. Those districts are always going to elect two Republicans and one Democrat. No matter how the people are feeling, even if it's a bad Democratic year, they're still

going to win the seat that has 80% Democrats in. Even if the Republicans nominate a candidate who is a little bit more extreme, that candidate is still going to win in the 65% Republican district. So not only is there no meaningful responsiveness to the will of the people, no matter how the people vote, the outcomes are always going to be the same. But you're also creating a situation where the elections are effectively going to be decided in the primary. And in primaries, fewer people vote. Turnout is lower. people vote, turnout is lower. The people who vote in primaries tend to be more ideologically extreme than the people who vote in general elections. And so you get a situation where not only is the outcome predetermined, but the types of candidates who are going to win are going to be

less representative of the people in the city. They're probably going to be more extreme. You may get candidates who are less qualified who win the city. They're probably going to be more extreme. You may get candidates who are less qualified who win the nomination. And because things are so lopsided in the general election, those candidates are still going to get elected. You may have a really, really good Republican running in the 80-20 Democratic seat, but that candidate doesn't have a chance. So that's how, if you imagine that situation replicated all the way across the state, every situation where the people drawing the lines have the opportunity to give their side an edge, that's how we get situations where entire states, including a state close to where you are, the state of Wisconsin, can get gerrymandered decade

after decade. And the districts in Wisconsin have been drawn so that Republicans, election after election, tend to win almost two-thirds of the seats. And in the last decade, there have been elections in Wisconsin where Democrats won the popular vote overall, and yet Republicans still controlled close to two-thirds of the seats in the legislature. And that lack of accountability is not a healthy thing for democracy, because it means politicians don't have to pay attention to public opinion. It means they can pursue their own agendas. It means they don't have to worry about being perceived as too extreme because all they

have to do is to win their primary elections and they get returned to power. And this is a situation that is occurring right now in far too many U.S. states. And that, I think, is kind of the harm that gerrymandering does to our democracy. Are there any states that are doing it right? Are there any states that have independent commissions that are not political, that are creating districts? I would say that right now there are three states that are doing it really, really well. And those states are California, Colorado, and Michigan. These are states that have not only put constraints on redistricting.

There are a number of states, including my home state of Florida, where there are provisions in the Constitution which say you're not allowed to gerrymander. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop politicians from doing it anyway. And when they do, you have to fight these long and expensive lawsuits with no guarantee of success to try and get the districts drawn in a way that's fair. What those three states have done is to take redistricting away from politicians entirely and to put it in the hands of regular citizens. So each of those three states has some version of a citizens redistricting committee where any interested voter in the state can apply to be a member of the commission. You have a random selection process, and they are evenly divided between Democrats, Republicans,

and independents. And it doesn't always produce a 100% fair outcome. But when you remove politicians from the process, when you give that power back to the people, it turns out that the people are much better at doing it than the politicians are because they don't care about protecting the careers of the people who are in office. They don't care about gerrymandering the districts so that one side always wins, they care about representing their communities. They care about drawing districts that represent the people of the state. How can people who dislike gerrymandering, who are listening to this and they're like, well, you're right, gerrymandering is terrible, let's get rid of it. What could they do to work to change the system in their own state? This, I think, is the most challenging part of this dilemma, because while I think that there is an easy fix, an easy remedy, following what other countries have done, following what these states have done, it's incredibly challenging to actually bring about

that change, because the people who are most opposed to redistricting reform, the people who tend to fight tooth and nail against getting rid of gerrymandering, are the politicians who control the levers of power, because it's in their own self-interest to retain the ability to protect their own seats and to retain the ability to give their side an edge. And so part of the problem here is that just voting for better politicians is not enough, because we're talking about a situation where the rules of the game themselves have been rigged. And if elections have been rigged, you can't unrig them just by voting because it's kind of right there in the design. And so certainly lobbying politicians, getting involved in groups that are advocating and campaigning for the end of gerrymandering.

But also, if you're in a state where you have direct democracy, where citizens have the ability to put initiatives on the ballot for a popular vote, this is where we've seen the most progress in redistricting reform. It's when people have organized, collected signatures, qualified an initiative on the ballot for creating some kind of independent commission. And what we've seen is that when people have the opportunity to vote on things like that, they are overwhelmingly in favor of redistricting reform. Red states, blue states, purple states, almost all of these ballot initiatives end up getting approved. The problem is just getting the question before the voters to begin with. And there are a lot of states where you don't have those kinds of direct democratic

mechanisms. And that's when it becomes a lot more challenging, that ultimately you're trying to convince politicians to give up that power. And that's why I think we've seen gerrymandering survive in the United States for as long as it has. Ultimately, maybe we need a constitutional amendment, but it's incredibly difficult to amend our constitution. That's why we've only had 27 amendments in 250 odd years. And so that's a major challenge as well. There have been efforts in Congress within the last couple of years to propose bills that would require states to create independent commissions for congressional redistricting. The problem is Congress has no power to tell states how to run their own elections. But because of the gridlock that we

have in Congress, none of those bills have ultimately been successful. Part of the problem, I think, and this is a bigger gripe that I have about Congress in general, is that so much of our legislating now gets done through these great big, massive omnibus bills where you cram in every single policy that you can think of, and then members of the House and members of the Senate have to vote either yes or no on this kind of huge omnibus bill. And we write legislation basically by just naming a dollar amount that we want to spend on a certain thing, and then we'll fill in the details later. And the problem with that is that it gives an easy out for people who want to vote against

them because they can just point to one thing in the bill that they don't like, and the result is gridlock. I think there are a lot of things that Democrats and Republicans would agree on. One of them is, I think, that gerrymandering is bad, and we should probably do something about it. The problem is that the anti-gerrymandering provisions have been bundled up in these big omnibus voting rights bills that Democrats have opposed. And a lot of the stuff in those bills is good, but a lot of the stuff in those bills

is controversial as well. They're things that Republicans are not supportive of. So when you combine all of that together, you give an easy out for Republicans who can point to one thing in the bill and say, well, this is bad, so I'm going to vote against it. So one of the things I've been calling for is for Congress to introduce the gerrymandering reform as just a separate standalone bill. Let's just have an up or down vote on it and see where people stand. Because I think there are a lot of Republicans who are looking at states like New York, states like Illinois, where there was a really pervasive democratic gerrymander of the districts there. And they think, well, maybe sometimes we're going

to benefit from this, but sometimes we're not. Perhaps it's best just to get politics out of this. And we think we can win more votes than the other side in a fair election. And when you have a level playing field, I think it incentivizes politicians more to represent the interests of the people. And there's not a lot of that going on right now in Congress. True enough. True enough. And it sounds like we need initiatives to amend state constitutions so that the pendulum swing cannot move back to like, you know what, nevermind about that, that it becomes very difficult to change once that policy is in place. And I think sometimes Americans feel like, oh, for the love, that is too much work. We can't do that. You know, we're doomed. We're doomed. That's it. It is easy to just feel that

sense of overwhelm of like, that's too much. We can't ever do it. Nevermind. It's we're, it's hopeless. We're going to hell in a handbasket. But it's not your job necessarily to fix it all. You can work just on the state that you live in. You can work with just one person who is in your state legislature. You can work incrementally to make these kinds of changes. It doesn't require you as a single individual to try to fix the entire election system in the United States. So don't, I always caution people not to let this sort of largeness, the enormity of a problem, keep you from doing something about it. Something, a whole bunch of us doing something is a lot better than four of us trying to fix everything.

Right. And this is, it's an unfortunate tendency that I've seen kind of creeping into our politics, this kind of fatalism that things are always going to be bad and nothing I can do as an individual is ever going to change things. But as you say, we don't have to do everything at once. We don't have to fix gerrymandering overnight. But any incremental progress gets us closer to that goal of a system where elections are fair, where politicians are responsive to the needs of their constituents. And the more incremental steps we take, the easier it then becomes to kind of take those giant leaps forward. But you have to lay that groundwork. And democracy is not self-sustaining. The framers of our constitution did a great job at creating institutions that could stand the test of time. and many of them have, but they didn't supply us with the norms or the virtues necessary to make that democratic system exist in perpetuity. That is our responsibility as

citizens, and it's why I've devoted my career to civic literacy, to ensure that we preserve and protect and defend that democracy and that we work towards making it better. Because it's very easy to backslide. It's very easy to backslide into elections not being competitive, people not bothering to turn out to vote, people not getting involved, people just disengaging from politics because they dislike all of the conflict and the polarization. And ultimately, doing that is only going to make things worse in the long run. It takes kind of a constant effort. It takes constant vigilance for democracy to continue to survive. And I worry that we collectively have started losing our appetite for the American democratic project.

And if that happens, things are only going to get worse. So whatever small contribution that you can make, even if you just vote diligently in all of the elections where you have the opportunity, that's a good thing. That's something that not nearly enough Americans do. It's something that I've become acutely aware of being an immigrant to this country, having to work for almost two decades to get the right to vote. There's a tendency to be complacent and think that things are just going to take care of themselves. And that's really not the case. So whatever way that you can get involved, voting in elections, signing petitions, volunteering, donating money to groups that

are trying to reform and make our system more democratic and more responsive, anything that you can do, if enough people do that, those things start to pay off and they start to have effects. Okay. If you could have your druthers and somebody were to read your book, if they were to read One Person, One Vote, A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America, what would you want their takeaway to be? I think the takeaway that I would want people to leave this book with is that there's nothing particularly different about today. People are people. And they've been people throughout US history. And the temptation is always there if you have the ability to take a shortcut,

to put your thumb on the scale, to try and influence the outcome in such a way that gives an edge to your side through gerrymandering. That has always been with us. But the reason why this is so much more of a pressing issue now gets back to this idea that we are living in an entirely different age. The information, the technology, the data, the software that we have available now means that gerrymandering is more of an acute threat than it's ever been before. So to recognize

that, and there's a quote that I use in the book from a federal judge from a case in the 1970s, which dealt with allegations of racial gerrymandering in the state of Texas. One of the themes that I dive into quite a lot in the book is how gerrymandering is often used by the powerful and against the powerless. And there's a long and unfortunate history in the U.S. of gerrymandering being used against disfavored minority groups to prevent them from getting representation in Congress. So in this case, the judge wrote, we must always remember that our todays are the product of our yesterdays. It has been wisely said that a page of history is worth a volume of logic. I think to confront the challenges to our democratic system today,

we have to know that history. We have to be aware of that history and how it informs where we are, to not just know how things are, but how we got here and how the temptations for politicians to put their thumbs on the scale, that's always been with us, but we face a unique threat from gerrymandering today. And incidentally, the judge who wrote that, his name was William Wayne Justice. So he was Judge Justice. And he was a jurist who more than lived up to his auspicious name. He was a champion for the downtrodden in society. He used his judicial career to try and make the nation a better place. And I've always thought it was unfortunate that he was never nominated to the Supreme Court because we were deprived of the opportunity to have justice, justice sitting on the bench. But I think that quote really illustrates the central theme of the book, which is that this is our history. And this is how we can learn from our history to make the future better and to improve our

democracy moving forward. I love it. If people want to buy it, it is called One Person, One Vote, A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America. It is written by Nick Seabrook. Where can people find you online if they wanted to say follow you on Twitter? So my Twitter handle is at Dr. Seabrook. That's D-R-S-E-A-B-R-O-O-K. And Twitter is basically where I share everything that I have going on

with regard to the book. I'm going on a book tour. I'm going to have various different events around the country, places like Portland, Oregon. I'm going to be in San Francisco. I'm going to be doing a Francisco. I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff here in Florida. And so I'll share all information about the book, the release, and the events that I'm doing on my Twitter feed. Thank you so much for your time today. This is absolutely so fascinating, so educational. We will have to get together sometime and play a game of alternate America. Absolutely.

Thank you, Nick. Thanks. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon.

I'll see you next time.