done we display in this room some copyist age differences from sam come from a very similar and unique perspective we only as he does that whatever your profession or our democracy sam exemplifies that duality with excellence and creativity let me say a little bit about his professional calling he is a professor of molecular biology and you're a science work is focused on how we how our brain works the process for some of it is related to learning issues some of it to the autism spectrum disorder and others that i  were like very much that i don't know what it is learning rules in the brain he is well trained california institute of technology stanford university do medical center didn't bell la technologies in new jersey but wait in the mid ninety's he also worked on science and education policy for the u s senate committee on labor and resources before joining princeton so maybe  to princeton he began developing statistical methods to look at the efficacy of campaign contributions whether they really work and how they work and to analyze u s presidential election polls out of that community that he organizes broadly and starwars in the princeton area from all disciplines including but not restricted to politics or science psychology computer science and mathematics a broad s democracy and i think the difficulty comes from being first and so united states obviously pioneering in representative democracy in our constitution is mostly something to be proud of but it turns out that there are some defects in it and so what i want to do feature of our democracy is that legislators by and large are charge of the redistricting process and as a result they will often build districts that suit them so we were taught in civics class that voters choose their court decided to draw districts to to favor its own party and that was the federalist so the federalist decided drugs very strangely shaped districts that joins all these counties and this is pilloried in the boston because that where they said well what is this strange creature that show and they said it's like a salamander we will call that gary so here it is going down in history as being how this thing named after him and this turns out to be something that happens in our democracy also other democracies little bit so just to give you a preview of we're headed to show you why gerrymandering is a new problem in our current politics and the answer to that is polarization i'm going to show you how gerrymandering distorts representation so that we no longer have influence over who gets elected f our districts in the number of people who represents us whether we're different kind of public and that number is not distorted by partisan gerrymandering one of the head with is under show you how it's possible to remedy gerrymandering through court cases that are progressing congress in this case the main way that those very congresses on the mission from liberal to conservative and you can see here that there is a separation between the two parties and this is something that we were familiar but if you think back to your memory to your recollection of politics eight ten twenty thirty forty years ago politics i think we all know as changed into the words of washington the mid ninety's and so i was actually present in washington at that moment in modern times when politics changed its tone  that was a change that happened you can see here the northern and southern democrats started becoming more like one another ideologically and the second to some of the democrats to the left in here you can see a major movement of republicans towards the right and i think this probably fits with your subjective impression that democrats or republicans at least the ones who think hardest about policy fight less and less to agree about and there's less and less overlap in the voting records of democrats and republicans and so against this backdrop we have our modern politics and so this is  situation in which people vote according to their party people are less and less likely to cross the aisle to vote with the other party and that means that more and more it becomes important how many members of the team each side house a constantly you may remember a time when a lot what really mattered was the particular issues dances or the kind of community member or whatever it was your legislator was and you may realize that more and more recently religiously was a member of the team right so and so politics has become a game in which the number of people on any side matters and so that's the backdrop against a come in with that backdrop is the idea that people vote more and more reliably and i'm going to take a wild guess that those a group of strong par find it very hard to imagine voting for a member of the opposite party and that is another feature of modern politics that voters become polarized and very hard likely to cross no cells what this means is that this creates a canvas for legislators to do their work so i say that legislators draw district lines as a result they have the freedom and they have the ability now especially with modern software to draw districts that are to their liking they give highly predictable outcomes and that's gerrymandering this is just some examples gerrymandering  the advantages of gerrymandering to reach the heights of the last few years and this has to do with the pacific nation of software for drawing districts it also has to do with like i said the predictability of voters now this is just some you know a gallery of roads here and i just want to show you these districts this one is pretty close to us on the pennsylvania south of district which includes both parts of pennsylvania proper you can see delaware erie i think your birth is over here someplace and so you have this crazy shape that joins all these districts that you might not think are very connected with one another this is the famous iraq district of illinois which joins two spanish speaking communities of texas thirty fifth district michigan fourteen ohio ninth i should say that except for the ohio district with four of these districts have in common is that they are landlocked there is no coastline that defines any border of any of these districts with the exception of lake erie along with your vision of this district as you can see that in the service of creating a congenial district legislators  specifically in some cases mandate shapes so for example the silver fourth district was actually drawn to join the interests of hispanic community here on on i forget what suburb of the system chicago but this is a predominantly hispanic community here another put on the hispanic community here in terms of the voting rights act says of this is a good district and the reason is a number of minority groups often feel left out of the legislative process as sometimes districts have to be drawn awfully in order to give them a fighting here's just an example as i said to you before this is how the greater philadelphia area if you look here you can see districts in here quite odd shapes and in some cases these districts become very narrow just a few hundred yards it's possible i think i think it's the president is a district it's possible if you're really going to go off at all to buy a golf ball at places and actually just start on one side of this district and have on the other side of the district because it's there right there is another that legislators go to the trouble of doing this is in order to create election outcomes they're highly lopsided so this is now the election of two thousand and twelve and you can see here that democratic candidates in pennsylvania the election won with eighty five percent of the book eighty nine percent of the  sixty nine seventy seven sixty percent of the vote these margins are large in some cases extremely large if you look at the side these are republican margins and these margins are now anywhere from fifty to two in this one case sixty three percent but these are smaller markets and where they win overwhelmingly then have your own side but not quite so overwhelmingly so that your vote your side goes for us more efficiently as the idea is you have a lopsided victory for one side but not the other and that's how you achieve a journey and that's basically of the matter and if you look at each redistricting cycle as i think most of you know redistricting typically occurs every ten years if the state gets it and the seventy two to eighty to ninety and so on until the current redistricting cycle and now this is the  in states where there's a single party close redistricting well herby democratic and blue republican red this is the average number of congressional seats gained by either side in each cycle of redistricting and you can see here that democrats had some benefits from so how can one address this and this is what i'm going to talk about here so here's the difficult i'm going to try to compress about a century of election law into just a few sentences without getting into too much but the basic issue is that in american democracy there's a large body of law and court precedent and these laws and court precedents really constrain how districts can be drawn and also they constrain how judges can judge whether about has been fairly  by that office justiciable means the supreme court ought to be able to regulate but the difficulty is that there's no practical standard for it and the court has struggled for several decades with finding a title standard and ten years ago justice scalia said well why don't we just give up since we here this is these justices are now arranged by ideology would get better ginsburg on the left clarence thomas on the right school is replacement course which is sort of over here now he said he's thought to be kind of about the same place as the leader so he's a little bit further to the right than justice that's true if you look at these not justices it turns out they all have a lot of documented stances on the topic of partisan gerrymandering of the topic of whether courts should act in the cases of x and roughly speaking there appear know the number of standards that they that they would accept justice anthony kennedy who's eighty years old says that partisan hearing is just difficult but there hasn't been any standard although he would be open to one and he high profile gerrymandering cases that if they reach the supreme court one of them is going to receive the supreme court one from wisconsin another one from north carolina it's called a recent supreme court and so these are cases where where the supreme court has a chance to weigh it once again on the topic of procedure let me just give you a sense for the nature of the offense here's pennsylvania again it's close to us and so it's a nice case to think about this is now from a piece i wrote for the new york times back in more people but of the democratic candidates and there are more seats in congress for the house for democrats in the lower left corner here for republicans republicans won more votes and republicans had more seats and there are some exceptions and i should say the reason i got interested in this in twenty twelve was after the election twenty dollars was such an exception and you can see here a datapoint here and wish more people vote for democratic candidates but in fact republicans retain control of the  and you can see here this data point here poll separate from all these dark data points you can just see it as she did region here in the shooting range and represents all national elections from one hundred forty eight to twenty ten so roughly speaking in the post war post world war two twenty sixteen different the thing that changed in twenty ten was a pronounced effort by a project called red which is a concerted effort by one side of the republicans to gain control of state houses and t true that came up in twenty twelve and getting back to the point i said before you might think this strange under used are a central part of gerrymandering in terms of that's not possible that's not necessary here by court order there's a newer district now again this is north carolina this is now the most recent election and you can see here maybe the see the back of these down trees are much more pleasing to god they're not as scripted they're not as pandering but it is still the case that in fact most of the republican side were mostly hovering around sixty percent so small talk so again there's a difference between democrats and republicans it's possible to do this without crazy districts and the way this is the reason this is possible is that this is now population to be put there for technical excessive gossip needed a way of knowing how many times to sample tops to figure out by her own whether you know the house of representatives were any good and the guinness company was very interested in not doing hundreds of hundreds of stuff mind credible but the reason he's worked for the story is that i've already told you the answer for what it is a registered users are trying to do they're trying to create lopsided wins for one side but not their own side that's what they're trying to do the way you is supreme court justice is clear just fire microsoft excel to do this because no experts are necessary i don't have to go to court because they don't have to be witnesses delayed with one another court i don't have to do a thing i just go back to the law which is great but here  facts this is not north carolina yet these are the democratic wins these are the republicans in twenty fourteen democratic wins republican wins if these were drawn from the same distribution by chance then they would be so close to one another they would be did not get a prize for knowing who was in charge of redistricting going into because if you look at this data it turns out of republicans are the ones we won by warlocks other margins and it was the democrats who were in charge of redistricting north carolina writes a both sides can do it one side did do it the other side's doing it now but you can see here they were carolina suddenly fifty eight democrats five republicans to being nine or ten republicans three or four democrats and nobody moved right expert expertise has to be certain criteria before it can be accepted by a court and there's nothing for meeting the standard like having something as one hundred years old has the terms of the test developed by this experimental group that has a hundred year old outcome of these court cases thanks very much know i'm super interested in your question because i've been asked this question several times in the last few weeks and there was all this there's some there's some there were some there were some are so so here's the bad news creating a larger house of representatives with more representatives would make the problem worse because it would create more boundaries that could be drawn to create a situation where a state like north dakota or new hampshire or delaware it could be gerrymandered where previously you could because if you know districts it's super hard to gerrymander so basically creating more district districts creates more district lines and so there might be an advantage to getting more districts it might put us more in touch with our legislators because there will be fewer of us per one of them so one can think of the good things that will come out of that but kerry has representation would definitely not be one of you would make the whole thing worse and so this is a separate problem that must be addressed in order to make your reform successful in making creating a response of the legislature sorry  standard it would be something like this a two party standard of intentions and the facts or we could look at the legislative record to figure out what the intentions were of the re distributors in the measure the effects using tests like the t and those that would be a way of remedying offenses that already occurred but in your question is contained the other have to report and it sounds like you're pretty knowledgeable about the other path to reform is at a state level creating laws commissions to deal with the some of the single state by single state basis whereas other california have either bipartisan we're nonpartisan commissions that specifically take the power of redistricting out of the hands of  ors and put them into the hands of a commission that either has to balance local party's interests or has the job of playing other criteria that can be done in states where there is a division of process or right it's the other i would be to get legislators to vote for such a law and not as a harder look right it's just really hard to get you know like if you're lives that are you're really going to go forward for such a law the one possible way i can think of would speaking it's a pretty tough look to get legislators to vote against their own power that's tough  the voting record the supreme court justices and voting rights and election laws are generally it's very clear and it's pretty easy based on precedence over the last ten twenty years to figure out how each justice of the cour and attracting more and more scholarship and so what i'm saying there is that the four justice i mentioned kagan sotomayor prior to her have well established records as saying that partisan gerrymander the fence according to the fourteen of the first amendment and that they know of standards that they could apply justice kennedy a republican appointee says that it's offense but he doesn't know the standard that could be applied but he says also there could be one if just the right one came along might be to his heart's content and he would love that standard but he just has apparently likes it that there are maybe four justices and very flavors  basically said some version of either let's see the two major players are on it's been too tough to judge and so we give up and that would be silly it and probably roberts of the other flavor is alito thomas  wasted if voters are packed into a district where the winds are too overwhelming and the people who proposed the standard are starting from the same point which is basically that him using election results to judge whether there is some kind of a symmetry between the parties and so it's conceptually simple that is a standard that could be adopted but by the supreme court i think one of the problems with that standard is that it is more news than gold has only has a history of a couple of years are you know taking the view that it's a newish political science standard with a lot of assumptions that one wouldn't necessarily want to go to such a standard so i think that that could be equated with the day but i think that this other  three hundred forty million pints of beer you're the needing to be able to sample the funny bone and gossip was trying to figure out how many times she had to sample house in order to be confident that the quality of the house is ok and the idea was to limit the yes so this is part of the rights act they used to be the good guys that said the districts surely majority minority which refers to a district in which the majority of voters to the state are members of a minority group so african american or latino that standard has since the original formulation of the idea but relaxed to be called something called a building to the left district which means that that's a community that helped that doesn't necessarily have to be a majority of the voters of the district but just enough in numbers that their general political interests will be represented and the reason that matters is that a majority minority district if you have a district to say i don't know fifty percent plus one african american then that's when the votes predominately democratic and they have a ago such a case can be brought one hundred years ago because those things were just allowed to occur but say forty or fifty years ago would be brought under the rationale that districts would be drawn to prevent these communities from ever having any representation right so for instance these committees would be practicing racial gender is complicated business and one of the reasons for coming up with the statistical standard is to find a way to establish a standard that doesn't take their position on single districts as being