Redistricting happens once every 10 years, and it defines the boundaries for local, state, and national elected offices. What is the difference between redistricting and re-precincting? How does redistricting affect communities of color? Will there be a large number of open seats in our state government in 2022?
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Massachusetts season 4 episode 17.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast
* Sign up to get updates at www.incorruptiblemass.org
Redistricting happens once every 10 years, and it defines the boundaries for local, state, and national elected offices. What is the difference between redistricting and re-precincting? How does redistricting affect communities of color? Will there be a large number of open seats in our state government in 2022?
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Massachusetts season 4 episode 17.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast
* Sign up to get updates at www.incorruptiblemass.org
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 8/22/2021 by FL, up to minute 30.]
Anna Callahan 0:02
Hey there! You are listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our mission is to help you understand state politics. So we discuss why it is so broken, what we can have in our lives if we fixed it, and then how you can get involved. So, got my great co-hosts here, Jordan Berg Powers and Jonathan Cohn. Jordan Berg Powers, you want to introduce yourself?
Jordan Berg Powers 0:26
My name is Jordan Berg Powers. I work in electoral politics in Massachusetts or at least I work in progressive politics in Massachusetts, and I use he/him.
Anna Callahan 0:37
Johnathan Cohn!
Jonathan Cohn 0:38
Hi. Jonathan Cohn, he/him, and I've been an activel volunteer in progressive issue advocacy and electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts based in Boston.
Anna Callahan 0:48
And Callahan, she/her, living in Medford, also love working on state politics, super excited about what we could do if we fixed our State House.
Anna Callahan 0:57
So today we are going to talk about something that may seem a little bit wonky, you know, some of our listeners are a little wonky! We love the wonky listeners, we love the less wonky listeners. I tend to be la ess wonky person. And so I am excited today, though, to talk about a topic that is going to be pretty detailed. We're going to talk about redistricting. So every 10 years, there is a census. And that is the federal government doing their absolute best to figure out who lives in the country and all sorts of details about those people. And that census happened last year. Then after the census happens, there is redistricting, and that happens at the local level, it happens at the state level, and it happens at the national level. That's what we're talking about today, because we're currently in the process of redistricting. And reprecincting. We'll talk about both of those. So we'll also discuss how it affects our state legislature and the state elections coming up in 2022. So I would love to just have-- Jonathan, do you want to jump in and talk a little bit about redistricting and what it is, what process?
Jonathan Cohn 2:26
Yeah. Awesome. So yeah, Anna, as you noted, every 10 years, we have that decennial US Census to count, to the best possible, who all lives where-- who all lives where in the US. People probably remember that hopefully. Everybody listening had filled out their census form online or paper or last year. And the census provides vital data for redistricting, as we'll talk about soon, as well as for public health purposes, for school purposes, for federal funding and state funding purposes. Because anything that relies on knowing who lives where, what the demographics of a population are-- it's gotta be important. After we get that new census data every 10 years, what happens is that states redraw the lines for their congressional districts and their state legislative districts. And then cities draw redraw council districts, at least here in Massachusetts, or at least in Boston, where we have council districts, some rely on wards some municipalities just rely on wards. Boston, that'll be next year. Because, if you think about it, all of our lines are currently based on the data that we have from a decade ago. People move. New people are born. People die. Many different things can happen in any of the all those places in the state over 10 years and we still have the goal of our nine congressional districts, should all have roughly the same amount of people, our same number of people, all 160 state rep districts should have the same number of people within reason. And all 40 senate districts, those numbers are fixed, right? We could argue whether the US House of Representatives should have a floating number of members of Congress, they should in my opinion, but right now they're fixed. We have our nine a portion this year, and we have to adjust all the lines accordingly so that they reflect the population with an idea of one person one vote, so that you don't have some areas where you have voting powers diluted by a number of people packed into one district and a heavily depopulated district elsewhere. Redistricting is something that can be often overlooked. The census is who lives where. Redistricting is who represents you, because that can determine who represents you. Whether communities are able to elect the people that they think can best represent that depends on that. That's why we've seen in a number of states around the country Republicans often doing shady things around redistricting, because it determines who controls power. [INAUDIBLE] Who draws the lines, and how they draw lines, all of that ultimately intersects with questions of power.
Anna Callahan 3:58
And I'm going to jump in for one second and just say, this is one of the reasons why state politics really matters. Because it is the states-- it is the state governments that do this redistricting, and that's part of the Republican plan is to take over states, redistrict in a way that reduces the power of people of color, of Democrats, progressives, and they succeed in doing that. So it's important that we pay attention to these things wonky as they are.
Jonathan Cohn 6:02
Yeah. You can draw, you can draw maps that empower communities of color, that empower young people, that empower low income communities. Or you can draw maps that do the opposite. And so that's why there are a lot of questions that's at stake around issues of power and representation in state government. But I will pass it on to Jordan-- talk a little bit about like, why this year's timeline was kind of messed up by typical standards.
Jordan Berg Powers 6:30
Yeah, so as many things, anything that Trump anything that Trump touches that he messed, he really screwed it up. I was about to curse and I was trying to stop myself from laughing.
Anna Callahan 6:42
Laughing cuz this is I felt the first time that we've ever talked about him on this podcast!
Jordan Berg Powers 6:47
It is the first time.
Anna Callahan 6:48
La-la-la-la
Jordan Berg Powers 6:49
Yeah, this is good cuz we obsess about it. But then this [INAUDIBLE].
Jonathan Cohn 6:53
We don't allow curse words like . . .
Jordan Berg Powers 7:00
Can't say the T word. Okay, so the Commerce Department underneath the last president was responsible for the census. So what is weird about the census, and I think it's hard for people understand this but we know how many Americans there are, and we know where they live. Generally speaking, they have addresses, they interact with the state. There's a lot of ways that we could count people. And the Supreme Court said, Nah nah, you can't do that. The Constitution is clear. You have to go through a process of physically counting people every 10 years. So that we have this weird thing, where we know, for example, that the number of people that the census says lives in Worcester, or lives in Chelsea are not actually the number of people who live there. rWe know this for a fact, but we can't do anything. So redistricting cannot say this is the number of people we know live here, and we can redistrict around it. Redistricting can *only* count the people who are counted in the census as a part of the redistricting process. So even though we know that something like 60 to 80,000 people I forget, I don't remember time I had in Chelsea live there, only something like 40,000 people were actually counted. That means 40,000 people filled out the census and Chelsea, and that's all that gets to count towards your state rep., your state Senate, your Congress. So I think it's important to know that because the census is *not* how many people live in a place. The media is again, terrible, and a lot of things that they just say like, Oh, this is America. I was like, but it's not. We know what America looks like, we actually there are much better ways to find out where American is, than to go through a process of filling it out online. So the last president's Commerce Department, he made a decision to both not physically count people. So not go door by door, not call people not try to make sure the count is correct. He also chose to not have much paper, but to do almost all of it online. So you went online, and you filled it out. And all of those things meant that we had one of the worst counts we've had in years. And it meant two ways it rarely went door. First, we definitely under counted a bunch of people of color across the country and certainly in Massachusetts, I don't know to the extent of other states because I haven't studied it but I know in Massachusetts we have under counted the number of people of color. So that means that people of color won't get their full representation in our in our elected bodies because we can't legally count them. The other thing that happened is that because of how they went about it, they so screwed up the data that the data normally comes out February, March, you get some early data, April, it's usually finalized. And we have a law on our books in Massachusetts that the cities have to finish their reprecincting, their drawing of the lines, by June 15. That is still the law. No one has changed that law. It is not June 15. We're not done. I have yet to see the police start arresting City Clerks. I am waiting for it to happen. I hear that the police enforce the law. There is a law on the books and no legislator, and no city clerk has been arrested for violating this clear violation of the law. So anyway, this is my pet peeve.
Anna Callahan 10:23
Cause the census was delayed, right? So it's not like they're sitting on their butts.
Jordan Berg Powers 10:26
So it's not their fault. But the legislature could have gotten rid of this law. It could have said, you know, what is it you know what, it isn't anymore? June 15. Maybe we should get rid of the law that it should have been finished by then. And in fairness, the House actually passed a law, I think June 14, like it really waited to the last second, which it did not need to do. We knew this was going to be a problem all year. And they could at any point, simply fixed it. But of course our legislature is incompetent to its core, cannot meet a deadline that is by law. It's in the law. So the--
Jonathan Cohn 11:08
What if they just like never adjourned on June 15? So they just keep saying it's still on June 15, because
Jordan Berg Powers 11:17
Yeah-- it doesn't matter because it's still the law that cities-- it's not even them, it's the cities that have to do it. And then the State Senate was like we don't want to do this because Bill Galvin threw a hissy fit about changing the reprecincting law. But again, it's past June 15, so it doesn't make any sense. So this is where we are right now. The census was delayed, we just got some, some legacy data, which to be clear, again, is actually not the final census data. The final census data will come out in mid-September, but we have enough data that we can start redrawing lines. So it normally comes out April. It's gonna be September. That difference in time is a huge problem for our process. And it has real problems that even with our Legislature's total incompetence, it's still not their fault, right? Like this isn't their fault that we have the delay that's happened to Jonathan's point, right? It's not their fault that the data came out late. And we're trying to figure this out. None of us, as far as I can tell, and now this is my second redrawing of the lines, and I've asked around, no one has ever seen this, right? We are flying blind in terms of how to do this because it's never been that the data got so screwed up. If only we didn't have such an incompetent president.
Anna Callahan 12:34
And super quick, just why the date that it comes out is important and why the date of the redistricting is important is when you draw those lines-- So for example, to run for a state rep seat or state senate seat, you have to have lived in that district for a year before the election-- November election--
Jordan Berg Powers 12:55
Just the state rep district. The State Senate-- and so in the Constitution of Massachusetts, you have to live in a state rep district a year before Election Day. You do not if you're running for State Senate, because John Quincy Adams was in France, and they did not want to have that as a recommendation because he didn't come back in time. His vote didn't get there in time. So when they wrote the Constitution of Massachusetts, they had a John Quincy Adams exemption for the Senate. So you only have to be a day before for the Senate, and a year before for the House.
Anna Callahan 13:26
A day before?!?
Jordan Berg Powers 13:31
Yeah, it's also a year for the all the other constitutional offices. So your governor, your lieutenant governor, your secretary of states, they'll also have to live in Massachusetts before. Interestingly, for Congress, you don't have to live in a district to serve in Congress, which is just a weird-- because Congress sets the limitations. And there are Congress people currently in Congress who represent districts they don't live in.
Anna Callahan 13:58
Wow.
Jordan Berg Powers 14:00
But yeah. So anyway, so just just to clarify, weirdly. So that means to Anna's point that reps have to live in their districts, at least by November 3, right? So in theory, so that means that they don't move, right? So they don't-- if you give them no time to move, you would have to live it, you would have to finish your the district by November 3 of this year.
Anna Callahan 14:24
Right. That's why the timing of this matters. And I want to ask, I'm not going to ask the redistricting reprecincting question now because city council and mayor elections, like municipal elections in Massachusetts are on odd years, right? And the state elections are on even years-- state, federal are on even. So what this means is that re precincting-- doing this work around the precincts. It really doesn't affect the elections. But talk a little bit about which of those supposed to happen first, which of those is going to happen first, like what the votes have been in the House and the Senate in terms of which one happens first. Jordan, do you want to jump in?
Jordan Berg Powers 15:06
Yes. So historically reprecincting happens first. And this is a really, I will tell you that I get lost in this terminology. So let's just break it down really easy for people. Your city clerk, your city elections office, your city, the town or city you live in, they draw lines. They say you live in this part of the city, that is Ward 2, or Precinct 2 or whatever, however they draw it.
Jordan Berg Powers 15:31
Some towns, because they're so small, they're all the same. They're all one precinct. Some have four, some have eight, the only regulations are that they have to be equal size. So if you say you split this town in half, they have to be equally half that size. Within something like 30, some wiggle room, it doesn't have to be the exact number. But it has to be roughly the same within some wiggle room.
Jordan Berg Powers 15:52
And so you know, you divide the city, so it's easier for people to go vote, so you're not going to the polls and waiting three hours, right? You want to draw a line so that people know roughly who they're voting for, so it's easy to figure out who you're voting for roughly, and so it's easy to go vote.
Jordan Berg Powers 16:06
And so normally what happens is: after the census data comes out, your city clerk goes through the process of setting new lines based on roughly the same population to make it easy for people to figure out where they vote to figure out who their city councilor is, those lines then become the definitions of city council districts. And those lines are then used as the basis for state rep and state senate districts.
Jordan Berg Powers 16:28
The problem with that process, and that is reprecinct so that's a precinct that is a re precinct-- that means you're changing the lines of the precincts. Every city by law is supposed to change it. Only Boston hasn't, does it? I'm sure Jonathan has some thoughts about that. But just really quickly, the next thing that you then do is redistrict. So after you have some precincts together, so I live in Worcester, Ward 10. So after you have your pen, then you would draw state rep and state senate around that precinct.
Jordan Berg Powers 16:59
The problem with that process is that the data that we get from the census is not by precinct because they don't have our precincts, right? It's national, it's by blocks. And blocks are literal city blocks. Sometimes it's a few blocks together. Depending on densities, sometimes it's a literal block, right? The data is small in geography, and it allows for the census to give us information about where people live, based on the things that we can redistrict around. And the thing that we care about as progressives and people who care about small d democracy is ensuring that people of color have an equal opportunity to have a say in their district. And the blocks allow us to do that at a granular level. So when you have reprecincting, come after, I mean, sorry, if you have redistricting coming after reprecincting, and we're one of the only states that does that, almost no other state does this process. Most states, they redistrict, and then draw some reprecinct lines in it to make it work, because you want to have your state rep, your state senate, your congressional data, you want to have as much opportunity to increase the opportunities for people of color to have a say as possible. And so doing it, redrawing your lines for your elected officials based on that smallest census data allows you to ensure that people of color are having their fair share, based on the census. Doing it the opposite way is a way to dilute the power of people of color.
Anna Callahan 18:27
You were talking a little bit before we started recording about how if the lines are drawn in a way that reduces the power of people of color, then you can sue the state state legislature. But if reprecincting is done first by the city clerks often, then it's not the fault of the state legislature. And so you would have to sue dozens or hundreds of different city clerks and it would be incredibly difficult.
Jordan Berg Powers 18:59
And city clerk's are-- I'm a big believer in democracy in this process I will say. I mean, it's not perfect. We certainly have lots of problems with redistricting. I don't want to sugarcoat that there needs to be oversight. But it's hard to have democratic processes for 351 towns and city clerks. Many of them are unelected. Many of them are appointed. They are usually older, they're usually whiter, not all but in some cases, and they're not accountable in the same ways that a state legislature is, and the courts have a harder time, right? It's harder to sue a hundred city clerks who reprecincted in a way that's racist, but I can sue the legislature, that's one entity, that if they do a problem, I can easily hold them accountable. In terms of oversight, the courts are our only real oversight in this process in Massachusetts. And if we do it the other way, as you said, it makes it hard to hold them accountable. Whereas if we use the census blocks, draw districts, and they draw those districts in a way that are discriminatory, I know who to sue. The one group to sue, there's one person, right? So--
Anna Callahan 20:09
I'm gonna jump in. So I'm just looking at a time, we don't have a lot of time left and there's so many things I want to cover. Jordan, if we can stick with you and just have you talk a little bit the bit about the Drawing Democracy Coalition. And
Jordan Berg Powers 20:24
Before we do, let's have Jonathan talk about Boston. And why the process this is really important.
Jonathan Cohn 20:30
Yeah. So one issue, something before we were talking about, I was thinking about immediately when you talk about drawing precincts of equal size, which is something that doesn't exist and never happens in Boston, because Boston is exempt from that process of redrawing wards and precincts. And I was just looking, shout out to the folks at limits. Barcroft and I got it from zebra cranmer shout out zebeta live is our colleague, Max, who did the analysis of the vary in the variation in the number of active voters by precincts in Boston. So there are a few that are like 6000, or more people per precinct, even though the average size is less than half of that for a precinct. So you have some like, the seaport, which has grown massively over the past decade is a massive precinct, you have a place like Ward five, precinct one, which is a combination of Chinatown, parts of Chinatown, parts of the South, and the entirety of Bay village and downtown by Emerson College, all put together in one massive precinct. And when you have situations like and then you also have one precinct, the harbor islands that has anywhere from zero to three voters, depending on the year zero, this you had one last year. And it's still its own precinct. And kind of like a. And so that creates like a fundamental inequity when it comes to like how many people per precinct which determines the lines you experience at the polls, and all that. And so Boston hasn't actually changed these lines in 100 years. And one of the things that advocates he has a great potential of kind of allowing kind of redistricting to happen before we precinct doing is it helps give an extra push to actually redrawing the precincts in Boston, or going to for example, that you have like the census block that I live in is actually takes parts of three different precincts in it. And it's in you have a situation like that, like that. And especially it's all like the college heavy areas around here. It's also useful because if the census block has all of the college heavy areas, it helps you understand where the college students live, as opposed to my precinct, which is a mix of college student heavy areas, in heavily Russian and Chinese senior housing, which are very different constituencies, and then to be able to disaggregate that which you can much do better with census data helps you see what exactly you're doing when building up the districts.
Jordan Berg Powers 22:59
And so the process for so what we would like is for the Drawing Democracy Coalition, which we'll talk about a little bit would like, is to have the reprecincting happen *after* redistricting. So first, you set up the new districts for Congress, for state rep, state senate, all the districts and then you draw the lines that make sense in to fit into those. It's what most states do. And it's not radical, it's not some nefarious thing, despite the efforts. But what it does do is it takes away power from unelected people. So of course, our Secretary of State Bill Galvin is against it, because it's more democratic. And so it takes away power from the people he oversees, who are relatively untouched by democracy. So of course he's against it. And you know, the House did the right thing, and it passed it to try to try to fix this process, and to put us in line with most other states. And, and the senate just did nothing. It didn't say No, it didn't say anything, it just did nothing. For months, June passes, July passes, we go into August. And finally they said, We want to do it differently. How will they do it differently? What will that process look like? We don't have time for them to go through this thing. And so this is again, where it overlaps with this podcast, which is that our system is broken, because you wouldn't in any sort of logical way wait until now to declare that you don't want to do it the way that everybody is asking you to do it. The way people of color asking you to do it, the way groups who are experts are asking you to do it, the way other states do it, the way the House got it together to fix. They're just like, we're gonna do something else, right?
Jordan Berg Powers 24:33
And so, and then when we started this podcast asked what like, what are we? What's the next process? And the answer is, we don't know because the Senate is at a luncheon with the house. So if you if you you can't have you can't do half in half out, right. Otherwise, you get into something which may break the law, which is you would break you have a district, right? You're running for state rep, and you have a precinct that's half you have another person, how will they know where I'm who I'm voting for? Right, based on my street, like that's a direct recipe for disaster. So we don't want to have that happen. The Senate has put us in a situation where that might happen, unless it acts to for some common sense. And so but we don't know what will happen, or we read precinct and then that takes four months. Like there's just not a realistic, there's not a realistic angle. And so just to put some timeframes for people, because some people ask them, Well, why don't we just push it off to, you know, Trump messed it up? Let's just put it off to 2024. But it's in our Constitution. So there are states, you know, you if you've seen in the news, where like Texas redistricted, in the middle of a session or North Carolina, they don't have restrictions, Massachusetts does. We in our Constitution, which means we'd have to change our Constitution, if we can't do in time. We *have* to redistrict by 2022. New districts have to be in place by 2022. And so we don't have time, there's no other alternative. Like you can't fix the timeline. It is what it is. We need to work around what we have. And we have two months. So more than ever, we need to to redistrict first, get that done, and then reprecinct because there's no time. [laughs]
Anna Callahan 26:12
And can you just briefly talk about the Drawing Democracy coalition?
Jordan Berg Powers 26:15
Yeah, so the Drawing Democracy Coalition is a coalition anchored by our C3 table, which is anchored by communities of color and groups of color, and groups that represent them. The the mass of the mass, Massachusetts Voter Table is our anchor partner for the drawn democracy coalition. Mass Alliance, which is also part of it, is also an anchor part of it for the C four side. And it's, and it's all the groups coming together to ensure that in this process, we do the best we can to maximize opportunities for people of color to have a say in their democracy. It is guided around the Voting Rights Act. So for those of you who care about voting rights act, again, this is another important place. A lot of the ways we talk about these issues, the way the guidance for these issues across the country that have been adopted by our state and other places are guidelines set by the Voting Rights Act. And it's ways to ensure that people of color have a say. Our legislature is is relatively responsive, surprisingly, I think, because some of them went to jail, for those of you don't know, we had a speaker going to jail over the redistricting process and the whole and their, and their maps got thrown out by a judge and they had to redo it. So they do not want to go through that process. They do not want to go to jail, and they do not want to go to court. So they are willing to work with us in a way that is actually surprising, and really a credit to the staff and the people in the redistricting parts of the of the of the State House. So they want to work with us. So what the Drawing Democracy Coalition is going to do is it's going to create its own maps: what Congress should look like, what state rep state Senate should look like, and we're going to submit it to the State House. The State House will then take that into consideration, draw maps that will then, hopefully, we don't know for sure, hold some hearings to say here's our message, we then can react to them, say we like this, we don't like that. And then they vote to finalize it. And then if it breaks any laws, we go to court. If it doesn't, then those are the maps.
Anna Callahan 28:14
Amazing. Last topic. Jonathan, can you talk to us a little bit about historically whether the process of redistricting causes there to be more open seats?
Jonathan Cohn 28:29
Yeah. Jordan, you might know specifically from the last go around with this, but one thing that that you end up typically seeing a wave of retirements around redistricting, because if you think about it, if suddenly your district changes in a way that's unfavorable to you, or if you suspect that's going to happen, you might see if there's an opportunity to move up, you might go.
Anna Callahan 28:51
You mean-- you mean if you're a state rep
Jonathan Cohn 28:53
If you're a state rep, yeah, or a state senator moving up for something right, and any different anything that's above you, if you see an opportunity, or if it's even like a job opportunity elsewhere, that you're toying with something might seem more attractive, if you realize maybe if your district grows larger than you feel like it, and there are some massive ones in the state. Or if you're if you're, let's say have a more conservative wrap in an area that's rapidly diversifying, you might think I'm out, or if the partisan composition of your district changes so that you used to be a reliably democratic district that's gotten the more conservative or reliably conservative district that's gotten more democratic, based on the drawing, since people legends like incumbents don't like running in unknown or unfriendly territory. So if when things change, it kind of creates that or even the prospect of change can lead to that in a way if they decide in advance of drawing the lines. It makes the life of the line drawers easier, since even though they shouldn't be drawing the districts with the incumbents in mind, they do. Like that unless
Jordan Berg Powers 30:03
They actually have to.
Jonathan Cohn 30:04
They have to?
Jordan Berg Powers 30:05
Yeah, they can't. There are some restrictions on purposefully hurting people.
Jonathan Cohn 30:10
Yeah.
Jordan Berg Powers 30:11
So if you redistrict somebody out of their district, you have to have a reason that you can defend in court.
Jonathan Cohn 30:17
Yeah.
Jordan Berg Powers 30:18
Otherwise, you could be open to a lawsuit. So there is some consideration.
Jordan Berg Powers 30:21
Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like, it's not as some people might have incumbent protection for, like shoring them up. Some might use that some might not, but not willfully and illegally drawing people out of their districts is like, you have to pay attention to that. And so if people just leave, suddenly, you have a lot of free territory to play around with when you're drawing the maps. So it'll be interesting to see as like, over the, to see, especially as the as legislators are eyeing these maps, do people take an opportunity to do something different or to retire if they're like, bordering retirement age, any past it anyway,
Anna Callahan 30:57
which means a nice opportunity to elect some great people in 22.
Jordan Berg Powers 31:03
Yep. So people just really quickly easy understand, act in a split up between two reps. Right now, there are two reps, their one rep is leaving, it doesn't make a lot of sense for acting to be brought up, maybe it gets put together. But you can't put it together. It's harder to put it together if they're two reps living there. Cuz then you have to prove by court, like, why did you do this? So two years ago, 10 years ago, they got rid of two districts where reps lived in them. And then one of them was Democrat, and one of them was a Republican, literally, so that they would like say, like, Look, it's not a part. We're not doing it for partisan reasons. It just made sense for the like, how we have to make the numbers work. So but so I just want to say really quickly, the just really quickly that this is really complicated stuff. And a lot of the way the media covers it is an oversimplification. I hate the way we talk about gerrymandering, I want to encourage you to look at john Oliver's report about this. It's actually really difficult. And we struggle with some things you are often you're often holding up to competing, equally important things like keeping districts together. But what if there are people of color? Like, you know, there's a there's a part of Hazel, which has a lot of Latinos who actually probably live closer to Lauren, or close to them? Do you put them in a district with Lawrence and break up? Or Susie, Matthew and Matthew and into Lawrence, right, do you break up McLuhan? And, and that's a problem, right? People who live in a city should should get to vote together. But there's these people that might feel closer to mark. Right? That's a complicated question. And the truth is that like it might be, there's no right answer. But what does need to happen is the only way that legislators can wade through this is if you unplug it, if you tell them, this is what I want to happen. They do take that into account, because they don't they're not experts on every little place and every little nook and cranny. So the drug democracy is a great coalition to have that. And I want to encourage you to join it. Fantastic.
Anna Callahan 32:53
Jordan, you wanted to mention one other call to action about? Yeah,
Jordan Berg Powers 32:56
so as far as call your members of Congress, this is happening, right as a human tragedy around Afghanistan that the US has created. I want to encourage you to call your member of Congress no matter how progressive they are, they are not doing enough. They are not progressive enough on this issue. We need to let in refugees, my preference is to let in every refugee who wants to come to America from Afghanistan, we have destroyed that country, I think it's the least we could do. We certainly should let anybody from a marginalized community of any sort. come in to America, who's a refugee from. from Afghanistan, Worcester is a refugee resettlement when one of the largest resettlement cities in the country, we have the means to do it. So encourage them to lift all bands, or at least one that you're comfortable with to a level. You know, we let in hundreds of that we let in over 100,000 Vietnamese following. Vietnam, we have led in less than 2000 Afghan ease, and it's just a human tragedy that we have created. So please call your member of Congress and let them know.
Anna Callahan 34:00
Amazing. Great, well, thank you both so much. And thanks, everybody, for sticking around for this whole talk. We will see you all next week. Bye bye.