- [Narrator] Support for Conversations LIVE comes from the Gertrude J. Sandt Endowment, the James H. Olay Family Endowment, and the Sidney and Helen S. Friedman Endowment, and from viewers like you, thank you.

(bright upbeat music) - Welcome to WPSU's Conversations LIVE.

I'm Anne Danahy, coming to you live from the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross WPSU Production Studio.

Pennsylvania's primary elections are coming up in May and this year there will be new legislative maps.

Even after the elections, there will continue to be discussions about how those maps are drawn, and if there are better ways of doing it.

We have three experts joining us tonight to make sense of what can be a complicated topic, and to answer your questions.

Our guests are Kate Huangpu, a reporter with the nonpartisan newsroom, Spotlight PA, She's been covering the ins and outs of redistricting in Pennsylvania, Chris Fowler, an associate professor of Geography at Penn State.

Fowler served on governor Tom Wolf's Redistricting Advisory Council, and Carol Kuniholm chair of Fair Districts PA, an organization that pushes for fair and transparent legislative districting in Pennsylvania.

You too can join tonight's conversation.

Our toll free number is 1.800.543.8242, our email address is connect@wpsu.org.

Carol, Kate, and Chris thank you to all three of you so much for joining us this evening.

- Thanks for having us.

(indistinct) - Legislative redistricting has been in the news quite a bit lately and it happens every 10 years after we get the new census numbers in, the new population numbers in.

Kate can you start us off by bringing us up to speed on some of the new recent developments that are actually just happening this week with legislative redistricting.

The supreme court in Pennsylvania just made some decisions about the state redistricting.

So kind of give us a little bit of background and bring us up to speed about what's going on.

- Yes, so we're officially finished with legislative redistricting.

It was the last part of the process during a 30 day period, anyone can file a challenge against the final legislative maps.

There were nine total challenges filed and the supreme court denied all of them, so we have confirmed that we will be proceeding in the next election with the maps that were finalized.

And there's a new set election calendars, well, so candidates can start petitioning, circulating their petitions tomorrow.

- So we have those new maps and the new calendar for the state legislative district and this is the general assembly so if someone is running for the statehouse, or the state senate, and there was also redistricting across the state too, for Congress.

Tell us about that, what was happening with that redistricting?

- So that ended in a similar position where the general assembly and governor Wolf couldn't agree on a map so it went to the state supreme court.

The state supreme court did select a final map and that will be the one that's going forward for the following election cycle.

There is one remaining court case in the middle district court in Pennsylvania but that is not at all eminent and has actually declined to pursue emergency status for this case so that it won't be affecting the upcoming election cycle, that sort of just brewing in the background.

- And this year the legislative redistricting had to take place in part because the census was done in Pennsylvania, actually lost a seat in the US House, is that right, Kate?

- Yeah, so the way Pennsylvania's population did grow overall, it just grew slower than other states growth, so we did end up losing a seat and that ended up being in mostly north and central more rural areas of Pennsylvania that were sort of merged together.

The population growth is really concentrated more in Southeast Pennsylvania and more urban, suburban areas.

So those districts didn't change as much.

- And for people who aren't following this as closely as maybe all of us are Carol, can you say why you think this matters, why does your organization think this legislative redistricting is so important?

- Well, all redistricting is important because it decides how we're represented.

So we got started in 2016.

When we looked at the congressional map at the time, we had some of the most gerrymandered districts in the country and we realized when your community is sliced into pieces, your voice is kind of diminished and your vote is diluted.

And at that time, Montgomery county, one of the more populous counties in the Commonwealth was divided into five different congressional districts.

My own county, Chester county, was divided into four districts when it, by numbers, it should be in one district.

And so we paid attention to congressional districts, but when we started looking at the statehouse and state senate, we found that they were among the most gerrymandered in the country as well.

And that meant that there are legislators who had been in safe seats with no real challenger for 20 years.

And we have a legislature that doesn't really have to listen to the people of Pennsylvania if many of the legislators are in their own safe seats.

- And Chris, what are your thoughts on that, why do you think it's so important, and do you think that it's a hard to understand sometimes for a lay person who doesn't necessarily follow all the ins and outs of it?

- I think if you're not paying really close attention, you may not be aware just how much power of drawing the boundaries presents for someone who's trying to game the system that a layperson might say, "Okay, yeah, you can give a little bit of an edge or a little bit of an edge there, but in fact, you can move things by the equivalent of 10% in either direction if you really push hard to gerrymander for one party or another.

And so getting something that's fair, that's balanced is a game changer, really is.

- And Kate, can you tell us a little bit about the processes?

So we're talking about the US House legislative redistricting for the US House seats and then we're also talking about the general assembly and there are two very different processes for those, right?

- Yes.

So for the statehouse seats that's done through this panel called the legislative reapportionment commission, it's a five member panel, it's comprised mostly of legislators, the top house and senate, majority of minority leaders, so two Democrats and two Republicans, and then there's an independent chair that is typically selected by the state supreme court.

So they are charged with drawing the map.

They have a strict schedule they follow, they come out with preliminary map, there's a time for public comment, then they come up with a final map.

That final map then again, has that period where anyone can challenge it.

For the congressional process, however, that sort of goes through like a typical legislative bill would where the general assembly gets to draw all that map, they have to pass it through the house and the senate, and then governor Wolf can approve it or veto it, he, in this case vetoed it and that resulted in the map drawing going to the state supreme court, which received about 13 or so maps from both legislators and good government groups and the governor himself and they chose based on that, that group of map.

- And there was an actual appeal of that decision too, right?

- Yes, well, that's sort of what's happening right now with the case brewing in the background where there's an argument that the judicial branch shouldn't have a say in drawing legislative maps, that's sort of the argument they're trying to make.

It's sort of more of a procedural issue than the validity of the map itself, but that we've seen sort of similar cases pop out across the country and here's a lot of speculation right now as to whether or not that might actually even make it to the US Supreme Court.

We're still sort of just waiting and seeing Pennsylvania was kind of a little bit behind the timeline.

So we're not at the front of that sort of debate right now where just trying to see what's going to happen in like North Carolina and Ohio.

These are all states that I think have similar issues going on right now.

So we're still in the wait and see sort of period for that.

- But in the meantime, thankfully, we get to hopefully move forward with the election and holding it on time.

Well, we do have a question and this comes from Alex, and Alex writes, "Regarding drawing district lines, "what are your thoughts on using a computer algorithm "or something like that to take the element "of human bias out of it?"

And maybe we'll go to Carol with that one since your organization really wants to see a more open and fair way of doing the legislative redistricting, what about that idea?

- Well, it's an interesting idea, and I'll say this round gave us an opportunity to see what that might look like because a group of petitioners for the congressional map actually filed suits saying, it should be done through an algorithm and they submitted a map and it was a really quite good map.

That was a surprise, they had constructed an algorithm that put legal metrics to the test and then they created an algorithm to choose from their simulated maps to choose the best one and the one they chose was quite good.

They also submitted a brief on the house and senate maps, where they had drawn those by algorithm again.

And it's interesting to see we would argue that that might be a great starting place, but that citizens need to have some say in what their district should be and what representation should look like for them.

So we think an algorithm is an interesting idea, but we would hate to see that be the final solution to this process.

- Interesting, so you think that human voice is an important part of the process, Chris, what are your thoughts on that about the idea of using an algorithm?

- My life is using algorithms to draw maps, this is literally what I do every day.

And one of the things I'll point out is the algorithm they drew involved metrics and waited those metrics based on priorities that humans gave to those metrics.

And so this idea that a computer is drawing it, it's only drawing it to the degree that humans decided what metrics to evaluate, which ones to put forward, which ones to leave in the background.

So there's a lot of human thought that goes into that, it doesn't make it neutral.

The choices you make there will determine in a large degree what comes out of that algorithm.

So I agree exactly with Carol that you can use computer algorithms to give you a sense of what the possible is, what the extremes are, but a good map will have lots of local voices that say, "Hey, this doesn't make sense right here, "'cause of this weird thing," and that's the kind of input you can only get with a public process.

- Interesting, so even if there is an algorithm, obviously there's still people in the process, that's a really good point.

If you're just joining us, I'm Anne Danahy, and this is WPSU's conversations LIVE.

Tonight we're talking about elections and legislative redistricting in Pennsylvania, and we're ready to take your calls.

Our toll free number is 1.800.543.8242.

You can also send us questions by email at connect@wpsu.org.

So I wanna go back a little bit to the process that Kate was describing.

And Carol your organization has advocated for having a citizens committee really at the forefront of legislative redistricting, what are your thoughts on how the redistricting turned out this time, both at the US House season at the state level, so how it turned out, but then also the process that was used to get there?

- So I would say that for the legislative reapportionment commission drawing the statehouse and senate maps, we were really impressed that it's a very partisan process, you've got four of the powerful legislators who are the four out of five votes, and yet the chair Mark Nordenberg did a phenomenal job of really speaking on behalf of the people of Pennsylvania, which he said, "In the past, "the commissioners have been kind of the deciding vote "and maybe really didn't have a lot to say or a lot to do "in the process itself."

He certainly took a different approach and really tried to make it a much more transparent process.

So there were, I believe eight public meetings, inviting hearing, inviting testimony from citizens before the preliminary map was drawn.

There were eight hearings afterwards.

So people could say, "Hey, you kind of messed this piece up "or this really shouldn't be divided, or could we fix this, "or I have an idea of how this could be better."

Some of that was incorporated in the final map and everything was available online.

In many ways, his oversight of the legislative reapportionment commission mirrored some the proposals that we've had, which would be that there'd be one website where all data is available as soon as it's possible, where all testimony would be public, where maps would be available in ways that they could be analyzed and tested.

All of that was done, so we were really impressed with that process and impressed with the maps that came out of that process.

The other process for our congressional maps was pretty much the exact opposite in terms of making information available, explaining how the process worked, it was confusing, never did get an explanation for why the particular map that was selected was chosen, what the metrics were, what the values were, no real expert analysis of that map until it actually went to court.

So we were not impressed with that process, not impressed with the map that was put forward and appreciate that the supreme court actually did a good job of adjudicating that and giving us a fair map, despite a pretty messy process.

- And Chris, I don't know if you wanna weigh in on that at all, the process that was used very different as Carol was describing to come up with the maps, are either of those satisfactory or do you think it needs to be scrapped and redone?

- I think the outcomes are reasonable, they're about as good as we could have hoped for.

One thing I'd add to Carol's statement was with the legislative, the state maps, I think they did a great job, but it's important to recognize that if you ask the people of Pennsylvania to rank the things that they prioritized in a map protecting incumbents comes last, it is literally, if you say, here are 10 things, the 10th one will be protecting incumbents and those maps started from let's protect incumbents, it's best we can.

And so I think it's, yes, the chair played a wonderful role in making the process good, but if you put the four most powerful legislators in the state and say, draw your lines, they're going to protect their friends and that's where they started.

And no other person drawing a map would start from that as a beginning principle, so there's still room to grow.

In the end, I think the map that they came up with is reasonable.

So switching over to the congressional side of things, the commission I was on with governor Wolf was designed to sort of lay out what are best practices, what would a good process look like, what would a good set of judgment criteria be?

And without sort of saying, "This is how you should draw a map," just sort of saying, "This is what experts from law, and geography, and math, "this is what we think would go into a good map," and try to make that available, and I think as Carol said, there was no transparency, there was no evidence that anyone in the legislature had thought about what a good map would look like, or if they did, they were very quiet about it.

- And we are taking a look right now at the two maps.

So this was the old congressional districts in Pennsylvania and the new congressional districts in Pennsylvania.

And you can see taking a look at that, that one of the areas it's most affected by it is the north central part of the state.

So the districts there got really reconfigured.

Kate, can you talk a little bit about that?

You mentioned it earlier on, so there have been shifts in population in Pennsylvania, was that one of the major factors in what we're seeing in the maps?

- [Kate] Yeah, essentially the fact that, to begin with a lot of the districts in these more rural areas in western and central Pennsylvania were underpopulated to begin with alongside the fact that most of the growth in Pennsylvania has been in these, urban, suburban areas, they've been in communities where there's a really strong population of people of color.

So these areas are the ones that are really expanding Pennsylvania's growth.

So in order to reflect that change, there are the areas that have to be drawn a little bit differently or afforded more districts.

So in the case of the congressional map, I mean, as well as the legislative map, there were more incumbents paired together that were in these rural sort of more remote area that were typically Republican legislators.

- And Kate or Carol, if one of you wants to weigh on this, did the court, when they were making their decision on that, did they kind of outline their explanations for why they chose that map because if you said, they have a lot of maps to choose from, and there's also different variables that go in to picking the map.

Did they explain why they picked that one?

- Yes.

So the map that they chose, the Carter map, their guiding factor was this idea of this change.

So they wanted to keep the map as similar as possible to the current congressional map.

So I believe around 87% of the residents stay in the same district that they were in.

Alongside that the map scored very well on all these traditional neutral redistricting criteria, there's equal population, I think there's a deviation of two people, minimal county splits, it's compact, it's contiguous.

So alongside those base neutral criteria where it sort of fulfilled all those metrics, I think the court really was trying to not rock the boat (Kate laughs softly) and go with something that is agreed upon as a solid map and is not a partisan choice.

The Carter map was actually one of two maps that were brought by sort of nonpartisan actors or individuals, they were also nonpartisan maps brought by organizations, but they were sort of the groups of individuals that originally filed the suit to begin with.

- And that idea of not rocking the boat, Chris, is that what you were talking about when you're saying that the maps tend to favor the incumbents?

- So I was talking about it in the context of the statehouse, the state senate maps, but I mean, in this case, you can sort of identify another public good, which is not changing who your representative is, more than necessary.

That seems we have enough trouble identifying who our legislators are.

It's like, it's not the worst thing in the world to not move that as much.

So there's a benefit there that's, in the public interest, so I can live with that.

And it's easier to protect incumbents when there's only 17, instead of the full suite of statehouse and state senate when there's so many.

- Right-- (indistinct) - Just another thought on that though.

I think the court made a pretty clear statement that that was not a principle that would hold at all times, least change, but that in this case, because the map had been redrawn in 2018 to be much more balanced and much more fair that in this case, since there was already that recent change, and since they already had affirmed the 2018 map, the map that stayed closest to that was their top choice this time, but there was nothing in that decision that would suggest that if they had kept the Pennsylvania statehouse as close to the last one as they could, that I think the court would've thrown that map out because the current map is a pretty badly gerrymandered map, I don't think they would've affirmed a least change in that situation.

I think it was a very specific situation that led them to affirm that value this time.

- And Pennsylvania's map was redrawn fairly recently because of other legal challenges, so it's unusual to have that happening, right, that typically you have the census and the new census numbers and the redrawing of the maps every 10 years, but that isn't exactly how things worked out this time.

- Well, the past decade has been a decade of litigation on maps, on congressional maps in particular because the 2012 redistricting cycle was so badly gerrymandering.

Redistrict has been going on a long time, but the technology has gotten much, much more precise.

And there was a pretty active campaign by partisan players in the 2011, 2012 redistricting to capture seats in Congress through that process.

And as states began to see the outcome of that, litigation began to be filed.

So the whole decade has had litigation in state, after state, after state.

What was interesting in Pennsylvania was that litigation, the appeal was to the based on the state constitution and went to the state supreme court.

All the other litigation was went to the US Supreme Court.

and the US Supreme Court has to this day said, "We're not going to get involved "in partisan gerrymandering questions," but because we have a constitutional right to free and equal elections in our state constitution, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court looked at the map on the basis of that in 2018 and said, "This is not a free and equal election."

If you have a map that guarantees 13 to five in every election, no matter what the vote share is one party gets 13 seats, the other gets five, any reasonable person would say, that's not a free and equal election, if you've got a guaranteed outcome, which is what we were seeing.

So the court ruled that there needed to be a new map, they had a new map drawn, and that's the map we've had since 2018.

- And this might be a good time, too Carol, for you to just talk a little bit more about gerrymandering, the idea behind it and why you think it has such a negative impact on political representation?

- So, gerrymandering is manipulation of district lines for personal or partisan advantage and it's been going on a long time, but new mapping technology makes it really easy to kind of decide how the districts will go into the future, you can predict it.

And interesting in 2002, we had gerrymandered districts, but by the end of the decade, that predictive power hour had begun to decline and the districts did shift at the end of the decade.

The 2012 districts didn't shift at all.

We locked an advantage for one party in both house and senate for the last decade.

So if you look at the way a population could be drawn, if you had a population that was 60% one in color one party at 40% another one, you could draw it so that one party got every single district, if you drew the districts in a particular way, or you could draw it, so the party that had a minority actually won a majority of seats.

And that's what we've been seeing in Pennsylvania and across the country, parties that actually actually have a numerical minority have drawn districts to lock in a majority.

We'd say there's an anti majoritarian map, it gives the power to the party that has less people, less votes.

And that's done by simply drawing districts to control the outcomes.

And it's toxic to democracy.

Let's just say it destroys democracy, if people's votes don't matter, if their voices aren't heard, if their legislators don't have to listen to them, what you end up with is something that is nothing like what our founders intended, which is legislators who respond to their constituents and a general assembly that answers the questions of the constituents and meets the needs of the constituents.

If you take that power away, what you get is an unaccountable legislature that doesn't really answer to anybody.

And that's, I'm afraid what we've been seeing here in Pennsylvania.

- So that's some pretty strong language, unaccountable and toxic.

Chris, do you see it that way too?

- I do and I want to emphasize that there's actually two issues going on here, one of them is partisan advantage and parties seeking to control the legislature through gerrymandering and the other is a question of representation, and those are all often interlinked, but there really are the separate issues there.

And so if you draw seats that are safe, so that an incumbent doesn't face any real challenge, if you draw seats where a shift in voter preferences won't lead to a shift in party control, you lose that responsiveness, you lose representation, and that can happen regardless of partisanship.

One of the things we get are these sort of sweetheart maps, where parties just sort of say, okay, you get your share and I get my share, and we'll just make sure none of that's contested and then we can just sort of, live off the fat of the land.

And I think one of the things that Carol's group is really sort of pivoting to is how do we move from partisan fairness to representation, how do we set up conditions where good people seek office and in order to retain that office they have to seek to fulfill the preferences of the people who elected them?

And our system isn't actually super well set up to have that happen at the moment, it's much better designed to reward partisan behavior, to reward polarizing behavior.

The person who can win in the primary in a Republican seat or in a democratic seat then wins.

And so what you have to do is impress the primary voters who are a very different set of the population from the electorate as a whole.

- And we have very different turnout oftentimes in the primary than we do in the general election, those are some great questions and we are going to talk a little bit about kind of some of the ideas for moving forward and we just want to let people know that they can join the conversation as well.

I'm Anne Danahy, and this is WPSU's Conversations LIVE.

Tonight we're talking about elections and legislative redistricting in Pennsylvania, and we're ready to take your calls and questions.

Our toll free number is 1.800.543.8242 and you can also send us questions or comments by email at connect@wpsu.org.

So I do want to get to some of the ideas I know that your organizations have for ways to move forward with this other things that might be considered, but before we do that, I also want to talk about one of the legal issues that's kind of still at the forefront, and it's a challenge to the mail-in voting that we're seeing in Pennsylvania right now.

There was bipartisan legislation, it was passed before the COVID-19 pandemic, and it made it easier for people to have the no excuse mail-in voting.

Kate, can you tell us about the legal challenge to that, where does that stand, and is that at all likely to affect the primary?

- So essentially was struck down by Commonwealth court, I believe, and now it's making its way to supreme court.

So what was a bipartisan movement, as you said to expand mail-in voting rights, suddenly became quite political after the 2020 election and was sort of seen as part of this wider movement to challenge the validity of the election.

So the attempt to restrict who is able to vote has popped up in other places in the Pennsylvania general assembly as well.

But as of right now, I believe it still stands it's going to still stand for the upcoming election, but it's going to eventually be heard by the state supreme court as well, and that they will have the final call on that ruling.

- Right, 'cause I think the number was more than two and a half million did mail-in voting, out of 6.9 million in the last election.

So that's talking about a pretty significant number of people who are doing the mail-in voting.

Carol, I don't know or Chris, if you have any thoughts on that, and the legal challenge and whether it could adversely affect turnout?

- I have some experience living in Oregon where the entire election and every election is done completely by mail and it massively increases turnout and more people vote and it's easier and cheaper and it just works better in every way.

So the whole idea that this is like, I actually love voting in-person, like it feels like super civic and excited to go to my polling place, but honestly it's a way better system.

So the contestation of it is really theater more than anything substantive.

- And it's really partisan, I think, the thought that would one party benefit by having it, would one party benefit by not having it.

Our election rules should not be structured election by election on who would benefit from those rules.

The election rules should be structured to say, how can we get the most people to participate in our democracy in a fair and equal way.

So that's really, really troubling.

Another thing I think is a big issue for Pennsylvania is there was so many threats against and so much hazard to election workers.

There's going to be an increasing challenge to staff or polling places at which point you would think it would make sense to start pivoting towards another solution, which would be to move even more towards mail-in balloting.

We need common sense solutions and this really does tie back to gerrymandering because gerrymandering turns everything into a partisan show instead of an opportunity to govern well on behalf of everybody.

And that's what we're seeing with the voting, the mail-in ballots, that's what we're seeing with the way maps are drawn or not drawn, and that's what we're seeing with lots of other things, they're all turned into partisan footballs rather than opportunities to serve the people of Pennsylvania and that's really troubling.

- And Kate, when you're covering this as a reporter, does it usually pretty much devise strictly along partisan lines, the conversations, is there any crossover with the issues?

- No, I would say there's some bipartisan movement towards redistrict and reform.

There have been redistricting reform bills with bipartisan support and I would also say, I think Chris mentioned, like political gerrymandering and body mandering that is bipartisan in another way where regardless of what political party you're in, incumbents are trying to stay in power.

So I don't think this issue is strictly partisan, however, yes, a lot of the times there is a partisan lean as to whether or not one supports maps strictly based on how the map affects one party or the other that is probably the most significant bias you'll find when covering this topic.

- Right, and Chris you've written and spoken about some of the possible solutions, some ideas for doing things in a new way and we could talk a little bit about those, some of the ideas rank choice voting, open primaries, and combining congressional districts.

Can you tell us maybe about a few of those, why you think they're worth taking a look at.

- So this comes back to this of moving away from issues of partisan fairness and thinking about representation.

So how do you create opportunities to incentivize legislators to represent their constituencies?

And so open primaries means that everyone votes in the same primary and the top two candidates go to the general election that removes that threat of sort of motivating and extreme base to get yourself elected and then sit tight in your safe seat, okay?

If everyone's voting in the primary, everyone's voting in the election, it creates possibilities for different kinds of candidates.

If you go to rank choice voting, this is an area where people can sort of elaborate their preferences for different kinds of candidates.

It allows someone to say, "You know this is my first chance candidate, "but if they don't make it, "then I'd really sort of like to see "this kind of person elected, "and, you know, ultimately this is my last choice."

By elaborating their preferences that way, you allow for more differentiation among candidates and you sort of end this sort of first pass the post dynamic, that again, ends up with a polarized outcome.

I've been a proponent of multi-member districts where you'd actually have three representatives from each district, and that's a little more elaborate, but the idea there is that you create space for someone on the left, someone on the right, and try and incentivize someone to run for the center or to get one of the major parties to try and move towards the center and try and capture that portion of the electorate.

And these are things that happen in city council elections, they happen in elections in other countries, it's not like crazy new ideas, it's just not something we do here right now.

And so thinking about some of these other broader ideas is a way of trying to change the conversation more towards representation and less about what's fair to parties, because part of our problem is that we're trying to be fair to parties and those parties aren't necessarily representing voter preferences as well as they may once have done so, trying to deal with that problem in the process, rather than just sort of accepting it.

- I want to ask about the multi-member district idea, so the idea of combining districts, so is that something that might happen at the US House level, so you'd take two or three districts and merge them, and then instead of voting for two representatives, I could vote for three, is that the idea, and then how would that improve the representation?

- So say you take a district that's 51% Republican and 49% Democrat and everyone votes, 49% of the people don't get their preferred candidate.

If you have that same population and you have three candidates, there's likely going to be a Republican elected, likely a Democrat elected, and then who knows what that third is going to be, is it going to be a coalition of Centrist Democrats and Centrist Republicans, is it going to be people who support prayer in schools or where climate change is their most dominant issue, is it going to be, who knows what that third could be, but it certainly allows for the possibility of someone saying, "Hey, "to win, to get over the finish line in this third slot, "I can't just rely on my base, "they're already going for that Republican or that Democrat, "I need something else."

And when people see the availability of that, lots of candidates are going to move towards that space.

It creates a less polarized environment and it creates an environment that rewards sort of coalitions and coalitions are sort of central to good democracy and we don't get them right now because the divide between Republican and Democrat is so big and there's no space for anything else.

- Carol, I'd like you to weigh in on that idea.

So your organization wants to see citizens in more control of legislative redistricting, what do you think about some of these other ideas?

- Well, we don't have an opinion on this, although we certainly are interested in them.

Fair to six PA is actually a fiscal project of the league of women voters of Pennsylvania and the league does have opinions on some of these.

So the league does support rank choice voting, has done studies on things like open primaries and definitely supports having less closed primaries.

So hybrid primaries, primaries that do allow everybody to participate, whether it's the top two or whether it's you still have Republican and Democrat, but independents and third parties are allowed.

So I do agree completely that there are ways to move towards better representation, ways to minimize the partisanship that we see and certainly Pennsylvania's structures guarantee a pretty partisan tone, which is not helpful when you need to have solutions to problems.

And we see lots of longstanding problems in Pennsylvania that don't get addressed because of the partisanship.

I would like to talk though about the solution that we proposed for redistricting, which is an independent citizens commission with people who are not in any way connected to, they're not legislators, they're not married to legislators, they're not staffers, they are people who don't have a vested interest, and that's a big problem in redistricting right now is the people drawing the maps have a huge interest in how those districts are drawn, it's a huge conflict of interest, no other country allows it.

And so to have an independent commission, it would have people who are not, their careers, their livelihoods, their families, their futures are not dependent on how those maps are drawn.

And we would suggest that you have some from each major party and then you have some who are not connected to a major party, so you bring that voice to the table in drawing the maps.

And we've seen other states that have commissions that work really well in this cycle, California and Michigan, their commissions did a great job.

We've also seen commissions that don't work as well and it has to do a great deal with how the legislation is drafted, what the fail safes are, what the criteria are, how the commissioners are chosen.

We're seeing some proposals here in Pennsylvania to create-- (indistinct) that are not going to work the way that we would want to see them that would not be genuinely independent, so we would watch that closely.

- And I want to get back to that idea of having an independent citizens commission, talk a little bit more about that, but we do have a call and this is a call from Bonnie in Cambria county about mail-in voting, I believe.

Hi Bonnie, thank you for calling, and do you have a question or comment?

- [Bonnie] Yes, this is not in regard to the redistricting, but during the last presidential election myself and I know of other people who have received several ballots in the mail to send in.

And for myself and the friends I have, we go to the polls to vote and I wish I had saved those mail-in ballots because I was thinking isn't that subject, I mean, that fraud could easily happen, what if I had voted at the polling station and then mailed in additional ballots?

That to me is, I mean, very questionable, who decides to send these out.

And I know there were many people other than myself that had received these in the mail.

- Well, thank you-- - [Bonnie] What is to prevent this from happening again?

- Thanks for your question, Bonnie.

And I don't know if any of the guests want to weigh in on that, the idea of how does it work logistically now, if someone registers to vote by mail, will they get their ballot mailed to them automatically are there concerns, was there any widespread fraud that was found in the last election?

- There was no widespread fraud I would say that was found in the last election.

I believe in that particular situation, I believe the county election director, there is a system where if you have already voted in-person, then your mail in ballot isn't accounted in that count because actually that's happened to me too, where I've registered for a ballot, but have actually been able to vote in-person instead in which case I just didn't mail in my ballot.

But the county election directors are the ones who organized the entire election they're working on a compacted timeline this time, I will say, because of the delayed legislation, legislative election calendar, as well as congressional election calendar.

However, generally speaking, they have a few fail safes to prevent situations like that from affecting the actual vote count.

- Okay, that's reassuring because I can understand that it might raise some concerns if you say, well, I went and voted in-person and now I have this in the mail, or I plan to vote in-person, but I'm getting this in the mail.

So you're saying that there are these fails if you put it to stop the ballot from getting counted twice, from someone essentially being able to vote more than once.

- And I think, remember, they're pretty strict about what happens with those mail-in ballots, they have to have a signature that matches.

And so if you've signed your ballot and gone in-person to vote and signed there, that's fraud and that's actually pretty easily caught.

And if you don't sign it or the signature doesn't match, then the ballot doesn't get counted.

That's built into the system to protect against that and it works pretty well.

And as far as I know, the fraud counts are in the single digits for the most part.

So it's kind of a thing that could happen and there are systems to prevent it, so it's all good, I guess.

- Well, we hope that answers your question, Bonnie, thank you for your call.

And Carol, we want to go back now to what you were talking about, what your group would like to see with legislative redistricting and some of the places that it hasn't worked as well, how would you prevent that from happening, how would you not fall into those same pits?

- Well, so when you talk about an independent citizens redistricting commission, it really depends on who the people are, and how they're selected, so that's one piece is to make sure that there's a robust selection process so that you're not letting legislators choose their best friends, which is what we've seen in some states as the legislators are choosing.

And then also what happens if the commission can't agree, if the commission deadlocks, does it go back to the legislature, 'cause that happens in some states.

So there's a kind of an incentive for some of the commissioners to say, "I don't want to be the one responsible for this, "I'm just going to vote no, "it's going to go to the legislature "and they're going to do the map themselves, "they're going to draw a district of themselves, "the old buddy meander is going to happen "where it's I do a safe district for me "and you do a safe district for you."

So it really matters how the selection process works, it also matters the bills we were supporting most recently, if the commission deadlocked, they would do a rank choice vote for any map.

So any commissioners could say, "This is my favorite map, "I think it's the best one," and then there would be a rank choice vote for all the suggested maps.

But the details matter, a great deal and then the criteria matters, how do you spell out what the maps should be, what are the criteria for the map, and how do you measure that?

And there's wonderful metrics now you can really evaluate maps well, to see, are they compact, or are they minimizing splits, but also how they meet partisan bias requirements, how they would represent minority communities, those can all be spelled out in law and right now Pennsylvania does not have those spelled out in law in a way that is easy to measure.

- And Kate, you talked about there being a little bit more openness in the legislature to taking a look at this, do you think that there is that willingness to though to kind of seed that power to give it over to a citizen's committee, do you think that there's-- - Historically no.

I'm sure Carol is working very hard to change that.

I know that there has been increasing public support for redistrict of reform, like I think it's something that the public in general is very much behind, but it's a situation where legislators are not want to often give up power when they don't have to and right now they don't have to, it's written in the state constitution that they are the ones that have this ability.

In reality, actually there's even a constitutional amendment where that was introduced by representative Grove to put even more power in the hands of the legislature for redistricting.

and there are a few that should be coming shortly that will put more power in the hands of the legislature for congressional redistricting as well.

So as far as change happening in the redistricting process, it may be coming soon, but it may not be to the benefit of independent citizens commissions, it might more be for the benefit of the legislators who want to have more control over the process.

- And Chris, what are your thoughts on that?

So the issue is getting a lot of attention right now, how do you maintain that interest and push that change?

- I mean, I think this is the problem that Carol's group is really trying to address that we have surveys and I'm looking one up on my screen here from 2019 that has 63% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats, and 78% of independents favoring an independent commission for drawing maps.

And that's in 2019 before, like the big rollout of this push.

And so one can only assume that's gone up since then.

And this isn't partisan in the sense that pretty much across the board voters would like this to happen.

And when you see legislatures producing the opposite, not just not doing this thing, but actually producing things with the opposite outcome, it only drives home how divorced from reality our legislature has become and how just completely insulated from voter preferences they've become, it's really kind of pretty striking in terms of if you're a student of democracy and how things are supposed to work, it's quite troubling.

- So I would like to say the bill that we supported in the 2017, 2018 session was a independent citizens commission.

We got 110 co-sponsors and some of those were Republicans and some were Democrats.

So when we talk about the legislature, it's really important to differentiate between individual legislators and legislative leaders and the individual legislators are not drawing maps, it's legislative leaders who are drawing maps.

And the individual legislators often have very little to say about what's being done.

And those maps are used to keep those legislators in line.

If they do what they're told, they get a safe district, if they don't do what they're told, in the past, and that didn't happen this time, which is great.

But in the past legislators who kind of have an independent streak and don't do what leaders tell them can their district moved to the other side of the state, legislators who do exactly as they're told, can find themselves in a really sweet, safe district going forward.

That's being changed with these new maps, which is terrific and it's important to realize that there are plenty of legislators in Harrisburg who would like to see things run differently, who would like to be able to move solutions on behalf of the people of Pennsylvania.

The leaders are the ones who block that and people need to understand how legislatures work and understand how important those decisions made in Harrisburg are, because every day I promise you, everybody listening or watching, every day is impacted by decisions made in Harrisburg, whether it's school funding, whether it's college tuitions at state schools, whether it's your roads, what you pay for gas, do you pay a toll, so many, what your property taxes you could go on and on, can you get telemedicine, do you have decent internet?

The decisions made there impact you all day long and people don't realize that.

And so our goal is to help people see that, to understand that, and to speak up on behalf of a legislature that works on our behalf.

- We do have a call coming in with either a question or comment, and we're going to go to that call in a minute.

Hi, thanks for calling, are you there?

- [Mary] Yes.

- Hi, go ahead, do you have a question or comment?

- I do.

I'm calling, I might have missed this at the very beginning of the show, but I wondered where the term gerrymandering came from.

I had heard it was named after a particular person who had also commented that the districts looked like salamanders.

So I was just curious about the origin of the word.

- I believe that's correct and I will let one of our guests confirm that the origins of the word gerrymandering.

- So the word comes from 1812, governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed off on a map that gave his party an advantage and there was a district that looked like a salamander, and the press called him out on it and they said there it is, they said that it looked like a salamander and they named it the Gerrymander after governor Gerry.

So when you hear the word gerrymander, think of the salamander named after governor Elbrigde Gerry.

He was actually a democratic Republican, so when you ask which party started, this, (Carol laughs softly) both parties were implicated from the beginning and have been implicated ever since.

- So bipartisan.

- [Carol] Yes.

(Anne laughs softy) - A whole.

Well, we haven't talked a lot about it, but the redistricting obviously is based on the census figures and there have been questions about the census count this time, it was obviously it was during the COVID-19 pandemic and the census bureau actually said that the 2020 census undercounted Black, Hispanic voters, Native-American people, and some college towns are concerned about undercounts as well because of the pandemic.

Chris, can you see people concerned about the impact of the census count and what that means for their representation?

- So I think there's a couple things here, so I'm in State College and we had 40,000 undergrads who weren't here.

And so that that's a big deal for a small town in central Pennsylvania and that's going to affect State College for the next 10 years.

So it's no joke for a college town like State College.

But aside from that, the larger issue has to do with which populations are undercounted and which populations are over counted.

And in that regard, yes, the census did undercount these populations and I don't know the exact numbers, so I'm not going to say them, but they're in the two percentish range, I think it may be as high as 5% for native Americans, I'm not certain about that, but these undercounts are actually a problem that goes back decades.

And it was really bad in the '90s and two '2000s, it got better in 2010, it got a little bit worse, but not, this is a consistent problem.

And it is probably most salient because of who doesn't get counted.

But in terms of, would the districts be substantially redrawn in different locations based on these, if we had a perfect, perfect count, it probably wouldn't make that much of a difference in terms of the fine edging of those districts.

So in practice, the census' accuracy is not what the courts treated in an allowable difference of plus or minus one person.

The census doesn't have that kind of accuracy anyway.

So it's a problem, it's a problem in the aggregate in the sense of undercounting certain minority communities, but there's also bigger fish to fry in the sense that a huge percentage of Pennsylvania's population identified as multiracial, the multiracial percentage increased by 225%.

And a lot of that is not new people or people who are newly of multiple races, it's about identity and about how people I see themselves on paper, and that has been changing a lot.

So there's a lot of worry about the undercount itself.

There's really a bigger issue about changing perceptions of who we are, and of course the pandemic just kind of messed a whole bunch of stuff up.

- Right, and Carol, we've talked about a lot of different issues, we have about less than a minute left, I wondered if you could just kind of end by saying how your organization kind of plans to take the next step after the election and people might have redistricting fatigue, how do you plan to kind of continue to carry that energy?

- Well, so we want to make sure people know that there are a lot of districts that are open this time without incumbents, more than 30 house districts, five senate districts, I think that might be a record.

So encourage people to really look at maps and think about that.

Number two is we're launching a fixed Harrisburg campaign to talk about the fact that bipartisan solutions don't get a vote and some rule changes that would change that reality.

And third we'll be continuing to research best practices for an independent citizen systems commission and preparing legislation to introduce in the new year on that.

- And Kate, we have a few seconds left, any thoughts about how you'll continue to look at this issue even after the election, as a reporter?

- There's so much material to cover really.

I mean, we're doing some map analysis and working on some pieces about the constitutional amendments that are happening and what redistricting reforms should look like.

There's so much to cover in redistricting and it never ends.

- No shortage of material there.

Well, thank you Kate, Chris, and Carol so much for joining us and for sharing your expertise on redistricting with us.

- Can I just jump in and say find out more at fairdistrictspa.com and check out our new fixharrisburg.com site to learn more about that project.

- Thank you very much.

We've been talking with Kate Huangpu, Spotlight PA's redistricting reporter, Carol Kuniholm, chair of Fair Districts PA, and Chris Fowler, an associate professor of Geography at Penn State.

I'm Anne Danahy, thank you for watching and listening to WPSU Conversations LIVE.

Please join us April 14th for our next episode of Conversations LIVE, Get Your Garden On.

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