In my regular duties as a neuroscience professor
I spend a lot of time looking at data,
whether it be for research,
it also informs my teaching,
and really I'm a math guy,
but I'm also a citizen of the United States.
And one thing that I've realized
is that democracy has been looking
a little bit wobbly and I think
you've probably noticed it, too.
This maybe goes back as much as 20 years
and I think that we can see
that in the last few years
democracy is not only wobbly, but it's
really kind of gone off the rails.
And so what I thought I would do is to
take those talents for data and analysis
and apply them to real world problems
of democracy and to come up with ways
to repair our democracy and maybe
make it look even a little stronger.
Now, you might think I'm an optimist,
which I certainly am.
I'm often accused of that.
But I think that paradoxically
at a time when our democracy
seems to be at a breaking point,
it might be possible to in fact make repairs to
democracy coming out of what got broken.
This is certainly what happened in the first
gilded age, back in the 1870s to 1890s.
Which later gave way to the progressive era.
And I would say that in terms of our
politics, our divisions, even the math of
how elections have turned out,
we are in a second gilded age, complete with popular
vote losers who become president,
congress changing hands, corruption in government.
There's just a lot going on,
but that's getting away from the math.
Let me talk a little bit about what
we're doing here at Princeton
to make things a little bit better.
I formed a team of people working on
policy and electoral reform, and we
are very interested in applying math,
law, and data analytics to
make repairs to democracy.
And in particular, I formed a group called
the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
And this gerrymandering project has
been engaged over the last five or so years
in finding ways to repair a
particular offence, gerrymandering, which is
a unique problem in American democracy
that is in fact arguably worse than
in any other democracy in the world.
Now what's gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the artful
drawing of single districts.
So you have to have a district system
with political districts where a
person gets elected from each district.
It's a problem in which legislators have
the power to draw their own districts.
And you can see already the problem, which
is that if legislators have the power to
draw their own districts, if they know
enough about their voters, if they know
enough about the demographics of the
place where they are doing their work,
they can then draw themselves into power.
And in the US the lines have to be redrawn
every decade, right after the census.
Oh, there's a census.
And that means that we are in fact, on the
verge of redistricting in all 50 States.
At the congressional level, wherever
there's more than one congressional
district and thousands of state
legislative seats, and even things like
school districts, town councils,
county governments, thousands and thousands of
districts will have their lines redrawn.
And this is an opportunity
on the good side for fair representation
but it's also an opportunity for
people who would like to take power away
from citizens and keep it for themselves.
The aforementioned legislators.
Now, I don't know necessarily
blame these legislators.
Legislators of course have dual duties.
They serve the citizens who elect
them but they also want to keep
their jobs and they have these two
duties that they have to fulfill.
Both to the citizens who elected them and
also, you know, they want to keep their
jobs for, for a longer period of time.
So they have that divided loyalty.
Now we on my team at the Princeton
Gerrymandering Project, here at Princeton,
do not have that divided loyalty.
We're nonpartisan.
As I said, we work with data
and we're looking for ways
to combine data, math, and law
to make districting fairer
across the entire United States.
What that means is in fact to do
something different in all 50 states.
If you follow the news in this domain,
there's racial gerrymandering,
there is also partisan gerrymandering
to favorite entire political party,
and recently the Supreme Court
said, we're not going to get
involved in partisan gerrymandering.
We're going to leave it to the states.
Now I worked on that case.
I submitted an amicus brief
with an alumna of Princeton
University, Heather Gerken, who is
now Dean of the Yale Law School.
And we worked on a
brief to persuade the court
that in fact there was a way to apply
statistical standards nationwide.
Now they said, no, they said,
no, we're not going to do that.
But that math can still be
applied in different states.
And now we come to the plan that
we have at the Gerrymandering
Project to help out in every state.
It turns out that in virtually every
state in the union it is possible
to achieve an outcome that represents
citizens more fairly, that represents
parties and racial groups more fairly,
that gives everyone a seat at the table
that is commensurate with how much, how
many seats at the table they ought to get.
And that's possible
through a variety of means.
One means is to pass reforms.
Now legislators don't necessarily want to
pass their own reforms, but in fact it's
possible to do so through voter initiatives,
through referendum, and occasionally through
legislators going along with the plan. And to
give you an example, reform is on the ballot
this November in Virginia. Where there's a
constitutional amendment that has been voted
on by both Republicans and Democrats to take
some of the power away from the legislators
and then put it in the hands of a commission.
And there are commissions
around the United States.
My team is helping out with
a commission in Michigan that's
going to start its work next year.
There's going to be a commission in
Colorado and there have been commissions
for years, for decades, in other
states including Arizona and California.
So reform is one way of
achieving a better outcome.
Now, unfortunately, voter initiatives are
only possible in about half the states.
And what that means is in other
states we have to do something else.
Another example is a student project,
which you can read about
by going to representable.org.
These are some students, mostly
computer science, but also from other
majors such as engineering, design,
and what they've done is they've
created a tool to let citizens
report their own communities and draw
them into a database, annotate the
database, and give it to redistrictors.
And so through the public input process
present what they do to redistrictors
to make themselves heard.
And that is actually also quite powerful.
And that can work in a number of states.
Now, we're recording this in the run
up to the November election in 2020.
And it occurred to us,
a few months ago, that it was also
possible to achieve change through
I would call it political brute force.
And what I mean by that is
creating a situation where
there's bipartisan input to maps.
And even though the most ideal solution is
to have an independent commission, one should
not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And a pretty good outcome is to
have a situation where both major
parties have a say in the outcome.
And I had some math students.
There's a student, who's a recent math
major also with a strong interest in
in politics and government reform.
And he and another student and
I got together and we came up with
the idea of mathematically figuring out
exactly where voters had the most leverage.
And this is a thing that we
called, Redistricting Moneyball.
Now, if you haven't heard of
moneyball, Moneyball is a book
written by Michael Lewis some years ago
In which he described the efforts
of the Oakland A’s, which were kind of a
minor team that was considered not
competitive for the World Series.
And they took money, they did statistical
analytics, and they figured it out exactly
how to spend their money as wisely
as possible to get a winning team.
And if you follow sports, then you
know that in fact the Oakland A's
ended up winning the World Series.
Now the student I mentioned, Jacob
Wachspress is in fact a club
baseball player here at Princeton.
And so the Moneyball trope
seemed like a pretty good one.
So the idea, just to step back a little bit,
is something that I've worked on here at
at my other project, the Princeton
Election Consortium for now over a decade.
And the idea is one of voter power.
The idea is you can read about
it at election.princeton.edu.
The idea is that voters are not equally
powerful all across the United States.
We all know about swing states, where
we're all watching Florida, we're
watching Ohio, we’re watching North Carolina.
That's an example in which voters in
those states are unusually powerful.
The same is true at other races, for
instance, in the United States Senate
it's very much a live question right now.
Who's going to control the US Senate come
January, no matter who the president is.
And in fact, there are certain states
where the race is very close and voters
there are quite powerful and there are states
where the state population is quite small
and voters there are even more powerful.
And what that means is that there are
certain voters in the US who are quite
valuable and they include right
now in the case of the United States
Senate; Alaska, Kansas, and Montana.
These are places where moving even a
few hundred votes has many times more
effect on the probability of what happens
in the US Senate than say moving
a few hundred votes in New Jersey.
I live in New Jersey and I habitually
think about how at a national level
my vote doesn't necessarily
count for that much.
For a while I was calling these Jersey Votes.
That seemed a little bit self-centered.
So now I just call it, we
just call it voter power.
And so you can read about voter
at election.princeton.edu
in the case of the Senate
and I encourage you to go
there and take a look at it.
And this is again, as I said, a
nonpartisan resource, whoever you want
to control the Senate, the calculation
of voter power is the same no
matter who you want to win.
Now what Jacob and I did
and another student Connor Moffitt was
figure out where state legislatures are in
fact competitive and on the tipping point.
And this gets us back to
the redistricting topic.
And the reason this is important is
look, we're all watching the presidency.
That's a four year question.
We may care about the Senate.
That's a six year question.
Redistricting is the playing field itself
and redrawing
the districts means that people are
redrawing the playing field of politics,
of American Democracy for the next 10 years.
And that fact that these legislators are
drawing their own districts is incredible.
And so what we did is we identified
half a dozen states where there are 93
congressional districts that in fact are
right on the edge between single party
control, which is bad, and bi-partisan
control, which we think is slightly less bad.
In fact, arguably good. 93 seats that
could be under bipartisan control.
That is one fifth of the
House of Representatives.
And so it means, my team does lots
of work gathering data, doing legal
analysis, helping groups around the
country, talk about reform, and that's
a soft form of improving the system.
But in fact, in November, it's possible for
voters to take a much more direct approach
and bring about bipartisan government.
Okay.
So I've done this big buildup. Now,
okay.
Here’s, here are the actual
states. The states where it's
possible to achieve bipartisan
control of government are as follows.
I'm going to list them in order of
our interest in them.
Texas, Kansas, North Carolina,
Minnesota, Connecticut, and Nebraska.
Now, this is an assortment of states,
some of them you recognize as swing states.
You recognize Florida and North Carolina.
I didn't mention Florida,
Florida as a swing state.
North Carolina is a swing state. Texas
oddly enough this year
is kind of a swing state.
It's not clear who's going to win.
But I also mentioned a state that
in fact is not a swing state, Kansas.
Everyone who follows politics knows that
Kansas is a solidly Republican state.
So what do these states have in common?
They haven't common voter power.
In the case of Kansas,
there's a Democratic governor.
There's a Republican legislature.
The Republican legislature currently
can override the governor's vetoes
because they have enough votes.
If they lose one seat, they
don't have the votes anymore.
And so it's possible for citizens in Kansas
to in fact bring about bipartisan
governance by shifting one seat.
That means that there are certain
districts in Kansas that are super
powerful and they're around Wichita.
They're around
Kansas City, in a county south of Kansas
City called Johnson County, which
is where there's a town called Overland Park.
If you're from Kansas, you know, these
communities. That would be an example
of where voters in Kansas in Johnson County
are unusually powerful because they can
bring about bipartisanship and in fact
can affect how a congressional district is
drawn in the eastern part of Kansas.
Now, Texas is a more obvious example.
And I probably should've
mentioned it first, Texas is one
of the hotbeds of partisanship
and redistricting wars.
There's all kinds of
stuff that happens there.
At one point there was mid-decade
redistricting, which is kind of crazy
when you're a redistricting nerd like me.
In fact, legislators fled the state
on the democratic side to get away from
the process and to try to stop it from
happening. Texas is just an endless show
of partisan gerrymandering, also racial
gerrymandering, because it's a state
we're in the last two redistricting
cycles, five districts have been added.
Five congressional districts
have been added because of growth
in the Hispanic community.
And yet that community's
representation has not gone up.
And that's because frankly
of race-based districting that works
against the Hispanic community.
So, this is a long buildup to say
that this year political conditions
allow the possibility of the Texas
legislature coming under opposite
control from the governor's party
and that again opens the possibility
of bipartisan governance.
And it turns out according to the math
that we've done, according to political
ratings, we put it onto a model.
We turn the crank.
And what we discover is that there
are some pretty powerful voters in
Texas and they're in the Dallas - Fort Worth area,
they’re in the Houston area.
Really just about a dozen
legislative districts. Citizens
there have an unusual amount of power.
Now we repeat this all over the country.
In some cases it's Republican
single party rule where bipartisan
is achieved by Democrats winning.
In other cases, it's achieved by taking
single party Democratic rule and then
the change would be bipartisanship
where in fact Republicans win. And
States like that include, those
States are Minnesota and Connecticut.
So really in either direction, it's
possible to achieve fairer districting by
bringing about bipartisanship which I
know is kind of a funny thing to talk
about these days because it's hard for
the parties to come together and meet.
But if they both have a seat at the table
and must deal with the other side
then I would submit to you that that is
an outcome that's relatively good
in our troubled times.
Now, finally, I should make an estimate
which is that in these half-dozen
states that I mentioned to you, the
margins of victory that are necessary
to bring about bipartisanship are as few
as a hundred thousand to 150,000 votes.
It's a minuscule fraction of the
total amount of the number of votes to
be cast this November or between now
and November because of mail-in voting.
And so this is really
a story of powerful voters in a
few states around the country.
And if you want to read about
those you can go to election.princeton.edu.
Now, finally, I have one last thing to say
about voter power, which is that we often
think about democracy as being in trouble,
our votes not mattering.
Our gerrymandering project is
dedicated towards the idea that society
should be more little “d” democratic.
In other words, more representative of
the people and more little “r” republican.
More responsive with legislators who are more
responsive to the citizens who elect them.
And so little “d” democracy,
little “r” republicanism.
Those are very important to us.
But I want to step back and say
that this idea that your vote is not
powerful is in fact wrong.
We focus so much on the national stage.
We focus on all these shenanigans,
these things, these scandals,
that, that, that turn the stomach.
And in some ways our national
politics are really at a low point.
But the way to renew democracy is to
start realizing that we live in the
system that I've learned about from
my legal scholar friends, federalism.
Where federalism is a system in which
authority comes not only from the national
government but the state government,
local governments, cities, and counties,
and other communities at those different
levels of community, people have power.
And what that means is that you, as
a voter, if you're a citizen in the
United States, you as a voter have
power everywhere in the United States.
Over at election.princeton.edu we've set
up a voter guide that describes all the
ways in which you can make a difference
locally, whether you're in a red state
or a blue state, whether you have
conservative ideals or progressive ideals,
you can pursue those ideals locally.
And I would really encourage you to
do that because democracy is in this,
I would say in my view, a crisis situation. I
think we live in a time when ordinary people
have to do much more than the ordinary
in order to preserve these ordinary
decencies that we used to take for granted.
And so I would encourage all of you watching this,
whether you're in the Princeton community
or anywhere in the United States
to go vote, to take a look at the resources we have,
and to think very hard about voting.
In fact, you can go to,
iwillvote.org, and you can see
how to vote and make sure that you are
prepared to vote by mail, in person.
However you want to do it in November.
Thanks very much.