good evening and welcome thank you for joining us on a friday evening i am the president of the puget sound lawyer chapter for the american constitution constitution society for law and policy a c s is founded on the principle that the law can and should be a force to improve the lives of all people we promote positive change for shaping the debate on important legal issues and by building networks of lawyers law students judges policymakers and individual community members a c s makes a difference in constitutional legal and public policy debates that shape our democracy and you can learn more about our organization and the work we do both here and in seattle seattle and the national community over at our table on the side one of the many priorities that a c s has is promoting a vigorous right to vote and protecting that refund amental right to vote we are proud to join with town hall seattle to present this timely conversation again to thinking that we are just wrapping up the local election season and that has had some very significant implications in the seattle area on the half of us i am thrilled to introduce you to our special guests this evening ari berman is a political correspondent for the nation and an investigative journalism fellow for the nation and stick to his stories have appeared and the new york times the rolling stone and the guardian and he is a frequent political commentator on c c span and n p r there are lots of initials in that has first book herding donkeys the fight to rebuild the democratic party and reshape american politics was published in two thousand and ten to widespread acclaim and his latest book  us the ballot available to my right was named one of the fifteen books you need to read this summer by the village voice and as a top nonfiction pick for summer by the los angeles times mr berman is joined tonight by washington state supreme court justice stephen gonzalez justice gonzalez was appointed to the washington supreme court in two thousand and twelve among other roles he has served as a trial judge on the king county superior court and as an assistant u s attorney in the western district of washington in two thousand and eleven gonzalez help secure prosecution for international terrorism case u s the reason for this he has turned he received the attorney general's award for distinguished service and the directors award for the superior performance from the department of justice these a company numerous other awards in our local community and clothing judge of the year by washington state bar association and two thousand and twelve and two thousand and twelve to two thousand and eleven and the twenty twelve difference makers award from the american bar association solo small firm and general practice division they're here tonight to discuss mr berman's latest book give us the ballot the modern struggle for voting rights in america please join me and offering up a warm welcome for ari berman and justice stephen gonzales thanks well good evening thank you for the kind introduction it's a pleasure to be here if you haven't seen it yet this is the book that we're talking about the give us the ballot which i had the pleasure to read in preparation for this discussion this evening i want to distort by saying that in this state we elect our judges and then maybe in part why i was asked to moderate this discussion i've been on the ballot four times twice in contested races and two times unopposed at the county level and at the state level recently there's been a discussion which i suppose in some ways is new about whether judges should be elected or appointed do you have an opinion on that talking to you that this morning you did but at this point i'm a journalist i told him i don't want to see the questions in advance and this is what happens in terms of i think that justice is should be appointed because i think it's unseemly for judges to have to raise money and campaign and make promises from people that they're supposed to that you look impartially on when it comes to the law but i think that those appointments maybe should not be life appointments there are certain life appointments at the supreme court for example that  i think may have not been such a great idea in retro fact and so norm ornstein has a very interesting proposal that he would appoint supreme court justices for eighteen year terms and so they would serve a long time they would be subject to political pressure but they wouldn't be there forever either and so i haven't really thought a whole lot of about this in terms of the broad sweep of my book but it's something to mull over for more discussion one phrase about  focus on my own situation so much but one one of the things people say about electing judges is it's a right the people of washington will never relinquish and never exercise and i think i think what's meant by that is there's a huge drop off on the ballot people don't know who the judges are there's no partisan symbol next to them in this state some states won partisan elections how do we get people to if we're going to continue to elect so many people to pay attention to elections more what  your ideas about making civics and elections more prominent in our discourse well i think first off and this may run a little counterintuitive to the notion of more people participating but i do think that we have too many elections and that complaining that their election lasted seventy eight days and and and that had just occurred when the iowa caucus had was just one hundred days away i mean so our elections last forever they extremely expensive there is a discussion in the media often of very frivolous issues and horse race coverage that dominates them not to mention all of the barriers that people face which i'm sure we're going to talk about in this the focus of my book but but i i think that if it's funny that the u s is the model for so much of the world in terms of exporting democracy because i don't think any rational person would look at the s election system right now and say this is what we want to emulate it sounds like you'd like to get to your book so let's let's turn let's try wrote a reason let's turn to that can you give us a thumbnail sketch of what the voting rights act is and what it means yes so the voting rights act is really one of the most consequential pieces of legislation ever passed by the congress it's not just the most consequential piece of civil rights legislation it's the most consequential piece of  legislation in general in terms of what it did and we had a situation before the voting rights act where only two percent of african americans were registered to vote in selma alabama only six point seven per se and of african americans were registered to vote in mississippi and so for all functional purposes we had a system where an entire segment of the population an entire region of the country was unable to vote and unable to cast a ballot and we really were not a functioning democracy in any sense of the term and so the voting  changed that situation by doing a few things the first thing is it struck down things like literacy tests and poll taxes and grandfather clauses and all white primaries and all the related devices that had prevented people from being able to register to vote in the segregated south and so when you went to vote in selma alabama for example you no longer had to name all sixty seven county judges to be able to make it on the voting rolls and that's something you as a judge you might appreciate this i doubt the judges themselves could have named all sixty six of their colleagues and not everyone had to do this through it and it was not it was and it was it was a kind of thing where white voters never had to face these kind of literacy tests this was something that was almost exclusively forced upon african americans so the voting rights act got rid of those literacy tests in related devices and then federal officials came to the south to register voters within days of the law passing and you had a situation where hundreds and thousands of people registered within days of the last passage so people really felt the  mediately and then federal official state in the south to make sure that elections were not stolen and over a longer period of time what the voting rights act did is it said to those states with the longest histories of voting discrimination that they had to prove their voting changes with the federal government to make sure they didn't discriminate in the future and then it also gave the federal government the power to strike down discriminatory election systems across the country that prevented not just african americans but hispanics asian americans native americans other native peoples from being able to be elected you know some parts of the voting rights act didn't apply to washington but applied to alaska for example what was the rationale for covering a place like alaska washington state so there was a formula in terms of which states had to approve their voting changes with the federal government because the federal government knew where the problems were but they couldn't just name alabama mississippi south carolina as the places that would have been unconstitutional so they designed this formula which is if there was less than fifty percent registered voters or voter turnout the nine hundred sixty four election which if if a state fit that criteria was very likely they had something like a literacy test or poll tax and a disenfranchised a lot of people alaska had a lot of discrimination against the native population there which i think is something that people don't realize that the voting rights act was initially aimed for good reason at the disenfranchisement of black americans in the segregated south but there are a lot of other people who were shut out of the political process hispanics in texas native populations in alaska asian americans in california and all of them benefited from the voting rights act as well now this was nine hundred sixty five when the voting rights act was passed did it immediately have an effect was there a delayed effect and what was the reaction to the passage of the go to war zone well it had an immediate effect in that things like literacy tests were abolished overnight and there was a very large increase in voter registration in mississippi for  example you had a situation where the you had six point seven percent of african americans registered before the passage of the voting rights act and within a year you had fifty percent registered so there was major major increases in voter registration and then over a period of time we since reconstruction andrew young from atlanta who was one of martin luther king's top aides and barbara jordan from houston texas two people who went on to be really super influential members of congress so there was a steady increase in terms of representation that use began to see a lot of people be elected not just african americans but the law was and expanded to encompass language minority groups inside spandex and asian americans and native americans  elected as well the law did have a backlash that i mean it's certainly true that one of the consequences of the voting rights act in this wasn't just specific to the voting rights act it was also the civil rights act another piece of legislation from the one nine hundred sixty s it what happened was a lot of conservative white democrats became conservative white republicans and people like strom thurmond the senator from south carolina who was very opposed to the civil rights movement they became power players in the republican party and so you saw richard nixon have a southern strategy and then you you saw southerners ation of the republican party become a lot more conservative and opposed the civil rights movement so i think the voting rights act democratized a lot of the country and made the south a lot more competitive it laid the groundwork for people like jimmy carter and bill clinton to become president and certainly brock obama but it it also is true that it led to a hardening of beliefs in the other party as well so you think it's led to some racial polarization  is that a fair statement well i think in a way it led to a lot less racial polarization in the sense that before the voting rights act you had no diversity in the congress and the essentially the representation in this country was entirely white and after that after the voting rights act passed you saw that they were african american members of congress they were hispanic members of congress they were asian representatives and what we saw in many places in the country is that these people were elected in coalition that when andrew young was first elected and lanta in one hundred seventy two he was elected from a district that was only about thirty percent african american now that was that was a that was a rare situation but it still happened but it was true that over the years there became much more racial polarization and now you have a situation the south in particular where african americans are identified as being with the democratic party and republicans and white voters are going to fight as being with the republican party and there's not a whole lot of crossover is there something wrong with a voter say i'm a woman i want to vote for a woman candidate why would i want to vote for a white candidate etc is there something wrong with that method of voting well i think it depends on how you're conceptualizing it if you're a woman and no women have been elected ever and you want to vote for a woman candidate i think that's perfectly justifiable and what the voting rights act was saying is that there were entire classes and races of people that have been shut out from the political process so people justifiably african americans wanted to vote for an african american because they had no representation hispanics want to vote for hispanics because they had a representation asian americans wanted to vote for asian americans because they had no represented but i think you also have to be open minded about it and what has happened so often in at large afterwards can you explain why that might happen so one of the things that occurred after the voting rights act was passed was the southern states immediately challenge the constitutionality of the law and this went up before the supreme court it was a two day argument one of the longest arguments in supreme court history and the verdict came down on march seventh nine hundred sixty six which was the first anniversary of the bloody sunday march when people including congressman john l were brutally beaten trying to march from selma to montgomery which more than any other event led to the passage of the voting rights act and the supreme court upheld the constitutionality of the voting rights act an eight to one decision and they basically said that the voting rights act was meant to enforce the fifteenth amendment of eight hundred seventy and as you well know the fifteenth amendment said very clearly that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race color or previous condition of servitude and for a brief period of reconstruction those words meant something  and we had black governors and senators from states like louisiana mississippi something that we never had seen since but federal troops left after the disputed election of eight hundred seventy six and we saw things like poll taxes and literacy tests and widespread violence a fraud all of which led to jim crow and the voting rights act was meant to end that problem so that's why the supreme court said it was constitution what happened after the supreme court upheld the constitutionality of its of the voting rights act as states like mississippi began to change their election systems and they both gerrymandered districts so it wasn't like they switched all of their elections they just made it so that some elections were conducted in the ways and that an african american candidate could be elected but they also switched to city wide county wide elections and what that meant is in a place like jackson mississippi which was sixty percent white and forty percent black the sixty percent white majority can elect everybody and in states like mississippi they refused to vote for an african american  so it meant that even after the passage of the voting rights act the representation was all white and not just all white but conservative white segregationists not a progressive whites who are reaching out to african americans and that also went to the supreme court and the supreme court in  sixty nine knocked down those kind of voting changes and they said that the voting rights act didn't just apply to voter registration didn't just apply to the right to cast a ballot it applied to everything relating to making a vote effective and that was a very broad interpretation of the law and the fight really shifted from registration to representation and after the ruling was that the states had to submit their voting changes to the federal government but these new kind of voting changes also were be blocked in the voting rights act that's when you really began to see so much of the country democratize for the first time and is that still the law of the and so that part of the  law section five of the voting rights act which is that those states like mississippi with the long as histories of voting discrimination have to improve their voting opinions with the federal government which was one of the things that nine hundred sixty nine decision said that was rendered in operative by the supreme and thirteen shelby county versus holder decision they didn't get rid of the federal approval requirement they got rid of the formula under which these states were covered and so to be clear we're not talking about the washington state supreme court here s supreme we are not though i don't think the washington state supreme court would have had the same finding and so what that means is that functionally speaking no states have to approve their voting changes with the federal government anymore what do you think that means for the future of enforcing the right to vote well i can tell you what it's meant in practice so far what has occurred since this shelby county decision in tw thirteen is that laws that were blocked as discriminatory under the voting rights act such as texas strict voter id law were allowed to go into effect in texas six hundred thousand registered voters which is about five percent of the electorate don't have strict forms of government issued d the laws are written in such a way that you can vote with a handgun permit but not a state university issued id and that blacks hispanics lower income voters are disproportionately less likely not only to have this id but less likely to have access to underlying documents like the birth certificate needed to get the id not only that but a third of counties in texas don't even have a d m v office so if you live in rural texas and you don't drive or have an expired driver's license how are you supposed to get to enjoy the county so that was the first thing that occurred after that decision the second thing that occurred is that states passed more sweeping voting restrictions that north carolina essentially repealed or curtailed all of its voting reforms and that states in north carolina actually had really good election laws and the state cut back on early voting they eliminated same day voter registration the ability to show up register and vote at the same time and before if that changes been proposed it would have had to get clearance from your department of justice before it could before the federal courts or a three judge federal court in washington yes and so that's how texas voter id law was blocked but with section five of the voting rights act is there no other way to challenge these practices there is i just want to finish in terms of what i wasn't done describing the litany of voter suppression following so so i mean in north carolina they they cut back all of these reforms they limited pre registration for sixteen and seventeen year olds which was taught in high school civics classes and this is a civics lecture i think it's important  counties and so those are the kind of things that we've seen and and these are all things that would have had to been approved with the federal government so now there's another part of the voting rights act section two of the voting rights act i don't like when i talk to talk too much about sections because there's a law school seminar  but just in terms of briefly describing section two is that section two is nationwide so it can be used everywhere just use recently and yakima to elect the first latino city council member so it  has it has the benefit of being nationwide applying to everywhere the problem with section two lawsuits is that the burden of proof is on the people filing the lawsuits the plaintiffs to show discrimination these are lengthy lawsuits they're very expensive they take a long time to win and a lot of times bad laws are in place and then you have to challenge them and what section five did is it blocked laws before they even took effect and they put the burden of proof on those states with a history of discrimination to prove that their laws are were not discriminatory so there are still remedies under the voting rights act but it's greatly weakened compared to what it was before the section five never applied here in this to those with it never would have been a remedy yes here at all and what happened in that you've just looted to the judge rice in federal court said that there had been a pattern of exclusion of latinos from from elected office and so changed from at large elections to district elections correct yes resulted in the first latino the most in this case ever being elected there yeah but we've seen the same thing happen in seattle you know have never had a latino or a lot of latino elected to city council before either why did it take so long in seattle as well well i think what we're seeing and this is why the voting rights act has been so valuable over the years is that it takes a long time for historically marginalized groups to exercise their political power that it's something that just doesn't happen overnight and in a place like seattle it could be that the changing demographics were a factor was seattle also just changed the district elections from at large as well so it doesn't just apply and this is certainly the places where there's been a long history of strife so yeah no it doesn't and i think i think that's a really important point that the that the voting rights act and the method of election matters a lot you know not just in the south that it  as mattered all across the country and that there are places that you would think of as very progressive that still have a long way to go towards representation now there are two young men in the audience a seaman isaac who in a few years will be able to drive and then after that be able to vote what is their path to becoming informed citizens who can really participated in democracy what advice do you have for their generation but i think they need to read my book for that if i could give them one single piece of advice i think that it was it was it was really interesting to me because  finished basically reporting my book when the film selma came out and so i had been in gross to in this history and one of the things that i really wanted to do with my book was tell the history of what happened after nine sixty five so tell the history of what happened after the passage of the voting rights act because there had been so much documentation of the events that led to the passage of the voting rights act the brutal beating of so many peaceful on armed demonstrators  in selma you started your book on the admin pages bridge on the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody sunday march with president obama and congressman john lewis and sixty thousand people going to selma this past march but i thought it was critically important to talk about what happened after selma because people know about some are you think people know about selma but what was interesting to me about the reaction to selma was that so many people prickly younger people didn't even know about sunday so they didn't even know that there had been so much violence inflicted on people like john lewis and that someone like john lewis walks around every single day bearing the scars of bloody sunday and this didn't happen that long ago that there are people still alive today who went through this and that this didn't happen in south africa or iraq it happened right here in alabama and so that was an eye opening experience for me and i think somewhat was an extremely useful educational tool for people to realize what people have gone through the struggles just to get this basic right and that it's something that we shouldn't take lightly that because of what people like john lewis went through everybody has the right to participate and it's something that i think we take for granted so often because we aren't aware of our own history we're not aware that in seventy seven when the constitution was ratified only white male property owners could vote or at the end of the civil war a black men could only vote freely in five states or that in one hundred twenty when women were given the right to vote that was a right that almost exclusively applied to white women so i think once you're aware of this history you understand the weight of this responsibility what the ballot means and also why this has been such a contested fight and that the vote really has power and if it didn't have power there wouldn't be such an effort throughout american history to try to restrict it i want to ask you another question about washington state here we no longer have a polling place you vote by mail everyone votes by mail does that system encourage informed participation or does have the opposite effect i think it is if you look at the  turnout numbers it encourages participation you're more of an expert on washington state than i am so i'm going to ask you a question in washington state can you drop your ballots at places and are there a lot of places at which you can drop your ballot physically yes to the first question no two there's not a ins but models so there are people that are uncomfortable voting by mail particularly i know in the south a lot of people that grew up in segregation want to vote in person to know that their ballot is counted there is also data that shows that absentee ballots prime primarily urban predominately minority neighborhoods are less likely to be counted than for predominantly white neighborhoods so there's a disparate racial impact in the counting of absentee ballots in certain places i don't know if that's the case in washington but it's been the case in places like florida as recently as in the last election in county has a were it worse record counting absentee ballots than for example some a joint account i know my sister lives in colorado and colorado has kind of adopted a fusion model of  washington which is that they are moving to all male elections and that they center a ballot so she now fast one she got one and then she was able to drop it many many locations in colorado they have it at the public library they have it wal mart's and i think that kind of system makes a lot of sense because you're not abolishing the ability to vote in person you can still go down there and put your ballot in but there's there's more options in terms of how we do it i don't think that's the only remedy though i mean i think there's other things that we could be doing for example even if you had vote by mail you still have a situation where a quarter of americans aren't even registered to vote so what your neighbor oregon has done i'm a little afraid to bring this up knowing the rivalry here but what oregon did is they became the first state to automatically register people who seek a driver's license or a state id from the d m v and then those voters can opt out if they want to but otherwise they're registered these young men who when they turn to get driver's licenses if they were in oregon would automatically be preregistered which would take effect in two years i think they i don't know enough about the law to say if they would be preregistered i know if they're eighteen and they are getting a driver's license they will be automatically  registered and i think that's really interesting because in oregon it could lead to three hundred thousand new people registering it's just been adopted by california in california it could lead to six million new people being registered which is a huge number of people being registered you're talking about people that are just proportionally younger just a portion of the voters of color who might not register otherwise but i also think it's interesting because the way of thinking of the vote as a right and not a privilege and saying that we're better off in a democracy when more people participate is the responsibility of the state and the country to make sure that more people do so which is not really the position that we've taken as a country throughout american history and moving again to another issue here locally we've just released locally  d voucher system to publicly finance elections what do you think about public financing of elections in general and if you're in favor of it what in what form well i'm a big supporter of public financing of elections i think that the analysts money chases had an extremely corrupting role in american politics and i don't think you can talk about voting rights without talking about money and politics and i don't think you can talk about money and politics without talking about voting rights because i think if you look at the supreme court's shelby county decision in twenty thirteen that we talked about and then the citizens united decision which meant that you can raise unlimited sums of money often in secret those go hand in hand it's an attempt to try to give the most powerful and most affluent people in society even more power and give everyone else less of a voice so i think that public financing makes a lot of sense many many countries have publicly financed elections they also have robust public media that are a force report substantively on the elections they have much shorter windows in terms of how long the elections take place so there really can be a discussion of substantive issues during that time and people are paying attention i think seattle is going to be a very very interesting experiment and now my understanding is every voter gets one hundred dollars right to spend how they like on on a candidate this has been something that reformers have been trying to push for for twenty years and what we're seeing is that in the absence of any action by the congress in the face of a hostile supreme court that states and cities are becoming the laboratories of change seattle's doing with public financing oregon's doing it with voting rights and i think if these things work well they're going to be adopted a lot more places a quote that is in your book earl warren wrote that we need to quote shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of evil to its victims what did earl warren me earl warren was the chief justice of the supreme court and in the one nine hundred sixty s and what he meant is that before nine hundred sixty five when the justice department wanted to strike down a literacy tests in a place like they had to analyze thirty six thousand pages of voter registration records the litigation averaged two and a half years and they were dealing with an often hostile judiciary in which the judges had been appointed by conservative segregationist southerners so even after they had analyzed thirty six thousand pages of voter registration records they then they had to go before this hostile traditionary that would often not rule in their favor what that meant is that the states that were doing the discriminant discriminating they had all the advantages they had all the built in advantages and the voting rights act was going to shift it so that now alabama had the burden of proving that a voting change was not discriminatory and that now alabama no longer could have literacy tests and so all of the built in mechanisms in the system that had been weighted against those voters that were facing discrimination were put on the states themselves  because what had occurred is that since the end of reconstruction the states had ignored the fifteenth amendment and they had nord so many other protections for voting rights and that's why the voting rights act was so necessary and that's why it ultimately was so successful because it not only got rid of these mechanisms that prevented people from voting but it was structured in such a way to ensure compliance from the states and this one part of the law that the supreme court rendered inoperative had blocked three thousand discriminatory voting changes from nine hundred sixty five to twenty thirteen no states can pass their own version of the voting rights act it doesn't have to be a national one isn't that true yeah how many states have something like that california to my knowledge is the only state that has a voting rights act and there's a proposal in washington state to do so how successful has the act in california been preventing the sorts of things that you've identified while the california law fairly specific basically what it's is that when there are at large so counting water citywide elections in places where there's a long history of racially polarized voting so you know whites for example refusing to vote for a black or hispanic candidate that that th ey need to switch to district based elections and it's been quite successful in california and there have been proposals to expand it as well it's not a replacement for the voting rights act the federal voting rights act because it doesn't apply  federally but it has been important in states and it's another way in which states are thinking about how to think innovative lee and become laboratories of innovation is there anything that i have asked that you really want to tell this audience that i just have think like a lot of people i kind of took the voting rights act in these sort of things for granted and i thought that i knew there was a civil rights here in the one hundred sixty s i knew that a lot of amazing things that happened but like many people i i kind of thought these battles had been settled and what caught my eye was that following the two thousand and ten election when so many states either flipped from blue to red or became a whole lot redder we started to see a wave of new efforts to restrict access to the ballot things like shutting down voter registration drives and cutting back early voting and requiring strict forms of i d to cast a ballot and purging the voting rolls and disenfranchising x felons and there was just a tremendous accel aeration of these efforts from twenty  were one hundred eighty new voting restrictions introduced in forty one states and half the states in the country passed laws making it harder to vote not washington luckily but what was so remarkable about this was it wasn't just happening in georgia and alabama mississippi in the old confederacy it was happening in ohio and iowa and wisconsin and pennsylvania states that did not have the same history of voting discrimination and it seemed to me like a clear attempt following barack obama's election to try to make the electorate older whiter and more conservative as opposed to younger more progressive and more diverse and instead of having more people participate have fewer people participate and so this was a really i ope thing development for me and i it was also a political story that no one was covering so i wrote about it first for rolling stone and then i wrote about it for the nation and i really followed the subject of voting rights all the way through the two thousand and twelve election and then after the two thousand and twelve election the supreme court heard this challenge to the voting rights act that we've been discussing and i became very interested in the history of the voting rights act and that's when i decided to write my book because i knew as i said earlier that there had been so much written about what led to nine hundred sixty five but there had been so little written about what happened after nine hundred sixty five and this was relevant because this year is not just the fiftieth anniversary of the voting rights act but we're in a whole new struggle over voting rights so it's something that's very very relevant to the debates of today so i knew that i would have a book that was both hopefully history that would hold up in five ten years but also something that i felt would be really important in terms of the current dialogue the current debate and the two thousand and sixteen election is going to be the first presidential election in fifty years without the full protections of the voting rights act and so i think this is going to be a very big story in the next election what do you think turnout is going to be like in two thousand and sixteen do you have a prediction of well let me ask you what is it been traditionally for presidential year elections nationwide and what do you think it's going to look like in the future well i mean at the very best we have sixty percent voter turnout in presidential elections and that's at the best we often heard fifty fifty five percent and in midterm elections were much lower in the last midterm election and twenty fourteen with the lowest voter turnout since world war two and what i saw and you never can draw a direct correlation between laws and turnout because there's a lot of different factors there but what i saw in two thousand and fourteen was this was the first presidential election since th first election period since the supreme court's decision i saw that there were many voters who were turned away from the polls in states like texas and north carolina because of these restrictions and they were turned away for no good reason there was no evidence of voter fraud to justify these measures and i think that's another important thing to talk about because the way that these laws have been sold is that there is rampant voter fraud occurring and that you need to show some sort of id or something like that to be able to counteract the fraud and it's important to note that this would only stop one kind of fraud which is in person voter impersonation and those that kind of fraud is incredibly rare there have been one billion votes cast since two thousand but only thirty one credible cases of voter in person nation and in the state like texas you're more likely be struck by lightning than you are to impersonate another voter at the polls and we have enough problems just trying to get someone to vote once in this country the idea that they would call it multiple times is a little hard to comprehend and of course i want to make a quick plug for those of you who vote for judges three members of not me but three members of the supreme court are going to be up for election next year where there are nine of us and we have six year terms and so every two years three are up and if you want to learn about how to vote for judges there is a good web site called voting for judges orgy it doesn't tell you who to vote for it just puts the judges qualifications you get to make your own choice but you only have to go to one place to research judges voting for judges or g and i urge you to look there when you're choosing the judge because you know if you don't know who to vote for leaving it blank is better we don't want you guessing right but i would really urge you to do that and one thing about voting by mail is if you have the time to do that you have that ballot in your hands for days you can do your research and think carefully and one thing i will say is that local races have become really critical in this struggle it was state legislatures across the country that passed all of these new voting restrictions it was courts both state courts like yourself and federal courts that have ruled on so many of these issues and so the composition of the courts the composition of state legislatures matters incredibly we have a situation or have an extremely conservative supreme court on civil rights matters not withstanding gay marriage where anthony kennedy has been more progressive but on other issues very conservative we have a congress that's paralyzed by inaction so the states are where the battles are right now the states are either restricting voting rights or they're becoming laboratories of innovation to expand voting rights but this work is happening at the local level so these local races are very important if you care about these issues  for your book i know that there are some available here for folks who don't get them tonight how do they find your book the easiest answer is they should get them tonight but but i mean if we write in this in this in this day and  age they can find it everywhere i mean they they should buy it locally at a local bookstore not at the new amazon store but they they should you know there's a bunch of really great bookstores in seattle i was just at  university bookstore which is selling books i got some wonderful pacific northwest themed books for my one year old daughter and i and elliott bay and many other bookstores here are great and i'm sure they have copies or failing that you know you can order it online and it's available on all the online places it's also available on kindle and it's also available on audio book if you have a nine hour flight coming out you can listen to the whole thing no i promise time for questions and down because people lose their ballots how do you think we can encourage people to actually mail the ballots in ideas about way to encourage participation when you get it in the mail or not just  you well do you have any ideas i don't live in of the vote by mail state it's not something that is as big of a problem in a state like new york do you have any ideas of living here have a few ideas i think it's critical of course that we publish voters pamphlets and that they're easy to find and informative and i think it's great when you have voting gatherings where your admission to that gathering is your feel that ballot that you then put in the box and i think if we have fun that way another way is to do something akin to a book club but you're having a voter's pamphlet club where you all come together you have an assignment for reading about one candidate or one initiative and your job is to report to your friends and neighbors at that meeting about what you think about that initiative or that candidate and make a recommendation i think that kind of discussion is key to a functioning democracy and a civics working those are my some of my ideas you know it's good john carter and i have a  question concerning this election we just had i was surprised to learn that in the state of pennsylvania they just had a really important election concerned three supreme court positions and the reason it was such an important election is it was about the issue of jury mentoring pennsylvania's been harshly gerrymandered by the republicans and i was a little stunned to find out that the party of the judges was going to make a difference about the gerrymandering and this is you know this is an issue nationwide day politicians are picking the voters instead of the voters picking the politicians that's what they're saying and so my question and i'm asking this because i have a daughter living in pennsylvania now and she's a an executive director of a public interest nonprofit that we're going issues like this and i wanna sound smart next time i talk to her so help me out here if an activist group were to devise a strategy that could even go nationwide to states to try to reform rectify the german problem what recommendations would you have to devise a winning strategy well i don't think that politicians should be drawing their own districts period i mean because it's driven by self interest whether you're a democrat or republican and so i think that we need to have independent commissions or nonpartisan commissions draw the districts and so that it doesn't just benefit one party or another and you have gerrymandered districts on the democratic side and you have extremely gerrymandered issues on the republican side you have many more gerrymandered republican districts now because they control so many more states there are i think something like i forget twice but of the eighteen elected representatives in pennsylvania thirteen are republicans so democrats only have five of eighteen seats in the congress even though president obama won that state twice and i think there's a problem when the congress has a ten percent approval rating but ninety percent of members of congress are reelected so something doesn't fit there and i think we need to try to figure out a way to take the politics  just some of the biggest issues with districts sometimes it doesn't lead to good results yeah you know we see districts are the only alternative that are proffered when we want to lock minorities as vs at large we have one or two options districts and at large but i happen to be a mathematician who specializes in voting methods and i know there are many other methods including methods of for example proportional representation where you rank candidates where you actually could get minorities represented even large for example if there were twenty five percent latino population you could get twenty five percent of your city council you like to absolute chinos even with that large elections if you can write candidates and so that rights act african americans had to take a literacy test straight so why exactly do you think that white people at the time thought that foreigners including at asian americans hispanics everybody why necessarily they were bad like they had to take those types of tests that's an interesting question well i think that basically there's always been a contradiction in our country between the fact that we said all men are created equal but we didn't structure our laws to reflect that that at the very founding of the republic only white male property owners could vote and so the founders made a very deliberate decision didn't like it wasn't like they didn't discuss it they made a very deliberate decision that they were going to exclude certain people and that that was a way that they were going to be able to retain their own power and the vote has been the way that people have retained their own power historically and so those in power have tried to create a system to remain in power and there have always been fear of one group or another that will threaten the power of those that are in charge and so in the segregated south for example many whites viewed african americans as a threat they view them as a threat to their political power  to economic power to the social order but it wasn't exclusive to african americans you saw discrimination against irish americans when they came over in new york italian americans you saw discrimination against asian americans in california you saw discrimination against against hispanics in texas and so while we like to think of ourselves as this incredible melting pot in many ways we are i think that is one of our greatest characteristics in terms of how we've structured our government we've always structured in such a way to try to keep people from participating instead of breaking them in and i think what the voting rights act tried to do was it tried to make real those words of equality that all men are created equal that were in the declaration of independence that we ignored for so long and when lyndon johnson introduced the voting rights act and i'd urge people that are interested in this issue to watch the speech that he gave to members of congress he really gave a moral appeal about the importance of voting rights and he said it's a wrong deadly wrong to prevent any of your fellow americans the right to vote so he phrase it as a right that everyone should enjoy and something that when we all didn't enjoy it we were all worse off because of it and of course when we said all men are created equal we left women out that was yet a question that too took us many years to remedy nine hundred twenty nationwide we were ten years ahead of that here in washington and washington state thank you for your question area question did you have a question or not so ok without the voting rights act what's to prevent these states from going back to literacy tests and are there any legal grounds for lawsuits against some of these draconian practices or well they can still be sued under the existing parts of the voting rights act so as we mentioned that those states with a long history of voting discrimination they no longer have to prove their voting finished with the federal government there but they can still be sued under section two of the voting rights act and that's what has occurred in texas and north carolina and has also led to successful litigation  yeah and a lot of other places the problem is that those lawsuits are expensive and they are difficult to win and they require a tremendous amount of organization and those people that are facing disenfranchisement don't usually have there's a lot of good groups working on this issue that i would urge you to to check out so it's not like all those losses just become more difficult and i think that states feel like this is something that they can get away with more than they could previously  and so it requires a lot of vigilance not just on the state level but it requires a lot of vigilance on the gnash on the local level as well one thing that was slightly encouraging is that when alabama closed all these d m v offices there was a big national outcry and a of people seem to get very worked up about the issue because whether or not you're pro or con voter id laws you can't really justify closing the very offices where people need to go get the id and so that's i mean that even supporters of the law would have a hard time justifying so so i think there is more attention on this issue people are paying attention more but it's not getting nearly enough coverage as it should i'm curious what you both think of top two primaries that's also a lot of interesting innovative questions in this audience and there's a very smart that's also been adopted in california so instead of having a republican and democratic primary the top two people face off against each other and the idea is that it will create less far right candidates and fewer far left candidates and they'll be more incentive for people to try to run to the middle i think it's marriage today is that people are not registering and they're not voting and it was interesting that you mentioned the ship has to come from making it sound so much joy that you're registering is that you're being represented and i'm wondering if anyone that you know of is trying to make for people who aren't interested he will use during trying to get more sexy in some way you have to know what i mean you have to get public figures who are really well known whether it's a sports figure yeah or a pop star or whatever it has to be made cool to vote again and there's many ways to go about this but the fact that so few people voted in the last election is just astonishing to me yeah and there has to be some way i think high school teachers especially have to tell the kids when they're sophomores or juniors but it is wonderful right you have t really stretches you have ideas about how to encourage people to register and vote well i mean i think that just getting them registered as a positive step that's why i think what's happening in oregon and california is interesting is there are people that for one reason or other are shut out from the political process and if they're then registered there you can at least focus on getting them to vote as opposed to spending all this time just trying to get them register in there we have huge problems with the amount of people are unregistered i think that the laws do matter though that if for example states that have same day voter registration have voter turnout of up to five to ten percent higher than states that don't and states that have voter id laws have turnouts of up to five first to ten percent lower than states that don't so your t at big swings in the electorate just depending on what the law is now that's not going to solve all of the problems i think that people need to see a link between the issues they care about and that voting will do something about it because i think there are a lot of people that care about climate change and a lot of people that care about mass incarceration and what's happening with the police in this country in a lot of people that care about women's right to choose an economic justice and all these other issues and and they have to see that voting will help solve those problems could you talk a little bit of the been sponsored by john lewis and has bipartisan support with senator lisa murkowski of alaska and it would restore the provision of the voting rights act that has been struck down based on more current data of voter disenfranchise discrimination it doesn't have much of a chance of passing in this congress but i think that the the point is to try to lay the groundwork for passage in future congresses and that if we had a different composition of our elected officials this thing could happen and also just for people to know that there is a solution out here so they're not just despondent about what's going on that they realize that there are innovative solutions whether it's restoring the voting rights act or it's automatic registration