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Using Data to Protect Voting Rights in 2020 Part 1

good evening everyone thank you for welcoming me here I'm ami Gandhi and I am a voting rights attorney at Chicago lawyers Committee for civil rights I'm really lucky to be joined here tonight by a couple of my colleagues Tina and Erica and please say hello to them as well and we're a group of civil rights attorneys and advocates who have been around for almost 50 years working to advance racial equity and economic opportunity in Chicago and beyond and in our voting rights work were especially interested in helping to protect the rights of all eligible voters we get questions in person and over the phone from a huge diversity of community members and we're really here to be a resource for anyone who may encounter questions or problems in accessing the polls but we definitely recognize that historically and even today there are particularly egregious barriers facing voters of color low-income community members women and other historically disenfranchised communities who have very intentionally been excluded from the polls over time our voting systems were set up to exclude these community members and so we especially are here to be a resource and an advocate for folks who are facing barriers to having their voices heard in our democracy here are a few examples about how our organization uses data now I'd like to brag to you that we're data driven and everything we do but we definitely have our shortcomings which is part of the reason that I felt really inspired to join you all tonight and to learn from you whether it's in today's conversation or beyond that and I want to thank ahac night board member Coulson AM AG for inviting me here and if any of you know her she's an example of a phenomenal advocate who uses data and stories in her own work to empower communities and and that's a lot of the kind of model that were inspired by and that we try to embody as much as possible we work with the race equity lens and we use data to identify inequities in our current system to try to craft solutions together hopefully with experts like you all to try to dismantle the inequities in our system and we're using data all day long on Election Day which is really the exciting time of our work and the time when our voting rights work is more active and I'm not just talking about presidential elections every four years but every single election that matters to community members in Chicago so beyond 2016 and 2020 but everything in between as well we talked to voters who experienced difficulties in all different parts of the voting process from before they even know whether they're eligible to vote until they enter the polling place are working with an election judge or poll worker to understand more about how they can exercise their rights we talked to voters who receive incorrect or or incomplete ballots or who face intimidation at the polls language barriers for new citizens the whole range of different kinds of voting experiences that we hear about a lot of the voting questions and problems that we hear about may sound boring or innocuous or kind of like a bureaucratic hiccup if you hear about it in isolation but when we consider the fact that there are some community members who and and some communities particularly communities of color who experience barriers and all the different parts of the small on their own parts of the voting experience but in aggregate it can be the difference between whether someone wants to bother going to vote or not whether someone wants to bother getting registered or not because there are millions of people in Illinois who are eligible to vote but not yet registered and these kind of barriers that again might sound harmless and isolation can make the difference between whether a community gets a voice or not in our democracy I felt like they didn't want me to vote I saw the number posted on the wall in the polling place the 866 our vote and I called I was able to talk to a lawyer for help [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so if you remember anything about today's presentation please remember that in any election you can call us at 86 6-hour vote 866 oh you are vo te and we have other language lines as well for people who speak languages other than English and also remember that we're a nonprofit nonpartisan organization very invested in answering any questions that people may have every election we hear from thousands of voters and we use the data to inform our work year-round and it linked in the materials for today's event is a website election protection Illinois org that we would love for you to check out pick apart tell us your reactions to and help us think of ways to advance that kind of data visualization going forward you can see a little bit of a glimpse of it here and on this site we have maps and numbers and excerpts of stories that came from voters that detail the kind of problems that voters experienced on Election Day in 2016 in particular and we're really grateful to a pro bono design firm moment design who created this site for us and who helped us mind the data so that hopefully our work between elections could be more driven by real-life experiences of community members looking at data like race and what are the experiences of voters from different racial communities when they're going to vote sometimes for the first time you heard from a community member to wanta and the video who called us when she was experiencing a problem at the polls so Towanda called us from the south suburbs of Chicago and she was improperly asked for ID at the polls even though she knew her she had an idea that she thought she knew her right in Illinois she thought that in Illinois if you're already registered we shouldn't need to show a photo ID in order to vote and the person who was working at the polls kept pushing back on her and saying no I insist that you do show me a voter ID when she tried to push back and assert her rights and even got us on the phone and had had one of our attorney colleagues on speakerphone she experienced even more hostility from the person working at the polls even after she was able to successfully vote the poll worker followed her out of the voting room and really intimidated her unfortunately now she felt like she was able to successfully assert her rights and vote that day and she was really concerned about other people of color color other black voters as well as senior voters who were probably turned away altogether in that polling place because of the poll workers either not knowing the rules or not wanting to respect people's rights appropriately and in many instances in Illinois and Chicago we are able to successfully advocate to election authorities to help people overcome these kind of barriers we're lucky to be in an environment where many of the local election officials here are trying to do the right thing but they're not they don't have eyes and ears everywhere on Election Day and they're looking to civic organizations like ours and poll Watchers like the ones who volunteer with us to report back about an advocate about barriers that are happening and we can best be equipped to try to address those issues that come up in the field not only in Chicago but all over this metropolitan area if we're hopefully effectively using data and stories to drive our work for the next election and this site is beautiful but it's been sitting here with the 2016 data and has not been updated in years and we've had really important elections that have affected people's everyday lives in 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and we really want to be able to do a better job going forward with opening up the vaults of our information and being transparent with our community here about the experiences people have at the polls and hopefully to work together to try to address those problems that occur so one of the ways that we tried to use the information to map out our election day strategy and our voting rights advocacy strategy more broadly is to look at information about community members in the criminal justice system who have been unfairly disenfranchised in Illinois on paper our laws say that we have the right to vote if we're in pretrial detention for example if we're in Cook County Jail and we can't afford to pay bail we haven't had a trial yet we've been accused of a crime but haven't been convicted of anything we technically still have the right to vote can people in Cook County Jail effectively exercise the right to vote oftentimes not we're you know we were trying to change the laws in that regard and and there's some hope on the horizon but right now there are also barriers for people with the past criminal record who have served a sentence who again in Illinois according to our laws we should be able to vote again after that point if we have a past criminal record but the real life situation is that many people either get misinformation about what their voting rights are in that situation or they are not familiar with how to reclaim their voting rights and so these are the kinds of issues that we look at when we're mapping out what kind of work should we do next at a systemic level actually and on this note we are expecting a bill to be signed into law this week itself that we helped write that would that's called the civics in prison bill that would help educate community members in peer-led classes in prison about how to reclaim their voting rights once there once they've returned to their communities and they're eligible to vote again but that doesn't take care of all the hiccups that can happen big and small on Election Day and so we're really interested in working with experts like you all and hearing your ideas about how can we better mine our own data to identify areas where we can anticipate problems at the polls how can we look at race income other factors of the location of community organizations who community members trust to about how we and and other people like us can be more effective in protecting voting rights and we try to use this sort of information to lead us to our year-round work beyond Election Day in filing litigation and advocating to government agencies in trying to get new laws passed and working with community members there have been a couple instances when we have been able to effectively use data and stories to change the laws and to expand protections for voting rights in Illinois election day registration and automatic voter registration are a couple examples of that that I won't talk about at length today but I'm happy to answer any questions that you all might have those are programs that thankfully advocates were able to come together and get those laws passed in Illinois as you can imagine getting laws implemented in a real-life sense can sometimes be another story but we're trying to get there we have also on the event information for today another link was shared about a report and analysis that we did in 2015 called the color of representation and we tried to look beyond just what's happening on Election Day and what are the larger structural issues that prevent communities particularly communities of color from being able to elect the candidates of our choice whether it's district lines that fragment our communities because they're drawn for partisan motive or in some suburbs and we're especially concerned about some of the south suburbs in our area that have a rapidly rising population of people of color but whose leadership structure really hasn't changed a whole lot in the in the last decades and who still have a disproportionately white male lead municipal governments even though the demographics of the people who live in our communities has changed a whole lot and so we map out in this color of representation report some of the places we've identified that have such severe under representation that it's really like ripe for a lawsuit it's really ripe for a legal challenge or for community members rising up and challenging the status quo we actually identified over 30 locations in Illinois 30 locations outside Chicago that again are prime targets for communities who are interested taking the advocacy to the next level holding the local government officials accountable hopefully working with attorneys experts demographers and others to come together to try to challenge the system Illinois law doesn't make it very easy to dismantle these sorts of systems and we're learning that and we've been doing a deep dive into the election code and municipal code and looking at ways to try to challenge these systems we could definitely benefit from a more careful look and a better understanding from experts in data about voter registration voter turnout and voting patterns more generally at a very specific local level so ideally even at the census block level although I understand that that's not something we'll be able to discern all the time but as as specific as data of data as possible can be used to show whether something called racially polarized voting is happening in a way that suppresses people of color from being able to elect the candidates of their choice and because of all the disenfranchisement in our country we're lucky that through litigation and through court cases we have a road map of factors that courts have laid out to say this is what a social scientist or a data expert is going to have to prove to successfully change a voting system so that the district lines have to be redrawn for example so that the ward lines or the state rep lines or the county commissioner lines or the village district lines have to be redrawn in order for the voting rights of communities of color to be appropriately respected just as an example in the 2011 redistricting many advocates from many different communities of color and many civic organizations had a huge public outcry about how the neighborhood of chinatown in Chicago was fragmented unfairly by the district the house Illinois House District binds at that time and through what I would say was a lot of solidarity and important analysis of different advocates coming together to challenge the status quo and I was really grateful to be involved with that fight in Springfield in Chicago we actually were able to successfully convince the powers-that-be the map jars to redraw the lines to keep Chinatown whole so that that community could have some shot at choosing their own fate for who their elected official was in the future and that led to the election of the first Asian American member of the Illinois General Assembly we also are interested in data experts not just confirming our own suspicions but maybe bringing insights to light that we hadn't thought of yet that we we hadn't heard about yet at the community level as far as how voters might be facing challenge or vote dilution and I'd love to hear any questions that you have thank you for your time I have two questions one is you you mentioned earlier about educating incarcerated individuals have y'all ever thought about educating like high school students putting a lot of effort and focus on high school students and get them to learn more about civics before it gets to that point that's the first question and the second question is or y'all work just to 2020 census is coming up and it's a lot of big arguments about the whether lines are gonna be drawn and especially in the southern suburbs and on the south side and I was just wondering if you were working with the maybe the Cook County Commissioner

https://youtu.be/O78jCdLCHsg

[votingrightslawyers-com]

Using Data to Protect Voting Rights in 2020 Part 2

I forget his name that he is that you know as your group basically is your group working with them to try to get some kind of equity and but the fair map in the way is drawn thank you for your questions the short answer is yes to all of the above definitely want to echo and lift up everything you just said we have an Illinois a law in place to require civics in high school and actually the governor just signed a law to require civics education in middle school I believe just a few days ago and we see that as being really encouraging I can't take any credit for any of those bills but we do see it as encouraging we also hear feedback from folks at times that teaching that kind of information in it could totally depend on the classroom as far as whether that's an effective way to get the message across there are gonna be some there's some really phenomenal engaging civics educators who have figured out ways to I mean we all want to know the secret to civic engagement and we all want to know how we can empower community men our own community members and people who we care about and some folks have figured that out and then there are other places where there's a disconnect where the person giving a message I may not be effective in all settings if I'm going and telling someone how important voting rights are and what we think is really important is the peer led model as much as possible and so it was actually incarcerated community members and students who came up with the idea of the civics in prison bill that soon to be signed into law and who said you know this has to be peer led this has to be on the inside someone like me is not gonna be as effective in that setting as someone with a life experience to talk about the importance of civics and importance of voting not just voting talking to our elected officials finding other ways to empower our communities and make a positive impact on our communities and there are great organizations like McCormick Foundation and others who have been at the forefront of civics education in the classroom to directly answer your question but as you can tell I also think that civics conversations outside of the classroom are super important as well the census is something that's going to affect us all in Illinois more gravely than in other parts of the country you've probably heard that we have a very strong chance of a severe undercount in Illinois of losing one or more congressional districts and because that is has been set into motion because of nonsense conversations and back-and-forth about a possible citizenship question because of you know real infringement to our community members rights we all stand and lose in Illinois regardless of our race unfortunately because if we have fewer members in Congress which is what is set to happen we all are going to suffer from less funding and and less of a count of our voices now it's not too late to try to make an impact in that regard you mentioned some local elected officials who are trying to make a difference at the state and county and city level that's really encouraging Illinois officials and I have a lot of critical things to say about Illinois candidates and elected officials but I have to say they've really put themselves out there to say that community groups need to have funding to do the hard work of knocking on doors of making sure that their community members are counted and that people who are commute trusted community leaders are probably going to have a lot more success doing that then a random official who's detached from the neighborhood daily life so really encourage anyone who's involved with the community organization to think about getting involved in applying for funding to help with census outreach or to get involved in the census counting effort in one way or another but it is also this the fights that have been happening about advocacy relating to census I think are foreshadowing some of the fights that we could expect when it comes to redistricting which would likely be happening after the census count is done and unfortunately it's been census has been one of the recent excuses for some of our elected leaders to pit Communities against each other and to pit communities of color against each other and I think that's a false choice I don't think we have to choose either having robust just as an example either having robust black representation or having robust Latino or Asian representation we're all gonna rise and fall together when it comes to being counted and and Illinois hopefully being represented well in the future okay so I'm going take a question from the agenda it says do you work with any people with disabilities because it's also an issue for people with disabilities thank you I want to put a spotlight on the work of a great partner organization of ours equip for equality that has been doing some groundbreaking work to negotiate with the Chicago Board of Elections to improve access ability in Chicago polling places in particular every election we also do get questions as Chicago lawyers Committee from community members with disabilities but the folks who are doing this work day in day out like equip for equality I really want to make sure to mention them because we learn from groups like that as well as National Disability Rights Network about how to improve access for all marginalized community members including voters with disability with disabilities including people of color with disabilities so it's all we also don't see it as necessarily just one distinct group or another in regard to the previous question I also wanted to mention a partner of ours Chicago votes who's been doing parades to the polls to walk with high school students from their classes to an early voting site and have a party and that's also helped to boost high school civic participation especially on the south and west sides of Chicago students graduate you should happen to pull they should have a diploma in one hand and a voters registration card in the other if anybody thought of that or you know it seemed like it I don't know I seem like it's not really it shouldn't be a real hard thing because when I was in high school which was a long time you know we had like civics in high school and I've got my first registration card it in high school and I've voted every sense and I using it as example that you know I think the public school system or the school system period should do something to try to get you know students before they graduate to at least get a voter to register for voters registration card I don't know it you know have y'all ever looked into you know something like that one of the things related to that that we are working on and certainly not just us a broader coalition of community members called just democracy Illinois all nonpartisan organizations is automatic voter registration so it's something technically that's part of Illinois law although it's in the very early and unfortunately flawed stages of implementation and the concept behind automatic voter registration is that if our state government already has our information in a database either through getting a driver's license or public benefits or another state system if we've already given documentation of our age and our citizenship status then why not add us to the rolls unless we wanted to opt out and so that's something that the Illinois politicians the Illinois members of the House and Senate all approved unanimously in 2017 and then Governor rauner signed it into law but making it a reality so that there are actually large numbers of people who are eligible but not yet registered added to the rolls again unless they wanted to opt out getting it to be a reality has been difficult and I think part of the reason has been state government systems changing because change is hard and change can be expensive and I definitely respect the incredible work that many of our government leaders and personnel do but we also think that the excuses aren't enough and there needs to be more to put laws like that into action because there was some really sound policy that work that went into putting those laws together so that it would ideally make our election system more secure and voter rolls more up-to-date so that when there is someone who becomes eligible or if someone's moved or their status changes so that that's all updated as seamlessly as possible but in practice that hasn't much been happening yet I think's again for presenting so my question is gone around the the the story told about the poll worker who intimidated that voter and also kind of your answer you just gave to the that previous question around sort of seems like I'm detecting a theme around there's there's putting laws into place and then there's actually like following through and making sure that they're actually like followed through and like implemented tying those two together like what is your sort of broad like strategy for following through on that like what do you do like what are the repercussions to a poll worker who is like behaving perhaps illegally right in that situation and like what are the ways that in which you engaged to actually do that follow through in these different cases for issues at the polling place as much as possible we try to address it real time by collaborating with election officials so that ideally the voter can vote that day that's our primary goal is to try to figure it out from a problem-solving point of view making phone calls going in person to the election officials we have people planted there at there and I don't mean planted and like a surreptitious for hope door but we have people who are stationed there all from our staff all day long which is I when I ask that question to election officials of whether they were okay with that and they said yes I thought is there a catch or something but actually we've been doing that the last few election cycles and I really admire them for letting us do that again given that we complain about them and complain to them I think it's a really good sign of a sign of good faith that they're willing to do that so that as much as possible real time if we can address something that's the best situation so that we're not why on earth would we want to fight a lawsuit about that later if it means someone can't vote that just is not the most efficient way to try to tackle it so what we try to do is advocate to the election officials who are going to be the decision makers about is there grounds to fire someone or to mandate retraining of someone who's disenfranchising people in that way the example that I gave to you from South suburb far south suburb what happened there is that the the top election official in that jurisdiction one of the county clerk's agreed with us that that practice that was happening at the polling place was wrong called the people who work at that polling place on that day and said look you've got to stop impermissibly asking people for ID there's a small minority of situations under Illinois law where someone should be asked for ID go ahead and ask them in that situation but don't just go asking everyone who comes in the door this is also a 90% black suburb it's not fair to ask everyone who comes in the door for their ID but that phone call happened late in the day so there probably were many people who were excluded earlier on so then we try to be as preventative as possible the next time around talking to those clerks talking to this staff about these are the I mean as as robust as our data can be in our tools to share the data like that mini website or other tools then we could hopefully effectively persuade the decision makers about practices they need to improve before the next time around we see litigation as a last resort there are some times we have to file a lawsuit and we hope that we could resolve the issue in some other way if as much as possible you'll have to excuse any ignorance of why we don't vote just online like what are the barriers to that and why like are there legit reasons from I guess I don't know your perspective of why that would be not good at this point in the homework I've done thus far and I am really hungry to learn more about this topic because something about the system or various parts of the system definitely need to be more easy and accessible to eligible voters but in the research I've done thus far I haven't seen compelling information that we're there yet in terms of the technology and the systems to make that happen securely and I I hope that I could be proven wrong eventually but when I'm seeing nonpartisan civic organizations like verified vote who we've worked with before national lawyers Committee for civil rights others who have been monitoring the election security scene and conversations and Washington DC and Beyond I'm not convinced yet that people's information and choices would be secure I'm coming around to the idea that our Illinois election officials are keeping our are making strides to better protect our voter registration information after that infamous hacking that has been you know it's all over the headlines about Illinois in particular and I do think that the State Board of Elections and other local election officials in Illinois are trying to learn from those vulnerabilities and do better for the future elections but that's just our voter registration information like for me it would be my name my address certain bare-bones information about whether I voted before but not who I voted for that's not who I voted for is not something that's stored right now but if we're talking about online voting and there there are organizations there are some advocates out there who feel differently and who are looking at certain kinds of technologies that they hope could overcome the security worries and so I think it always should be part of the conversation to evaluate those with rigor but I haven't seen compelling information that were there yet from a security point of view but online voter registration does exist and definitely want people to use that I think that everyone weren't um hello thank you for presenting a newly effective way to do voter suppression is through coordinated disinformation campaigns you only need to get a few thousand voters in let's say Michigan or Pennsylvania to not vote in order to have a substantial effect on an election is this terrain that your organization has a policy position on and is this something that even has a legal approach that would help to remedy some of the prevailing concerns I would love to learn more about that area because I think my ex Bertie's Evette areas at the level of reading we're all reading the same similar headlines about that and it's scary I can tell you that there's missin there are misinformation campaigns and voter intimidation that happen every single election in Chicago and Illinois I'm not trying to be alarmist because I'm I do think our voting system is overall good here and I encourage people to participate so I'm not trying to scare anyone or suggest that our elections are invalid but every election especially hotly contested elections in Chicago and Illinois we see things come up that if a national reporter heard about it they would be up in arms and it would make that that news cycle but because it affects fewer number of people and it's especially if it occurs in an odd number year where there are elections that affect our daily lives for a village trustee or an alderman or other positions like that is just not something that as many people pay attention to we as a voting rights and civil rights organization do pay attention and we've have found that those elections are the times in Chicago and Illinois where we have to be even more ready with non-partisan poll Watchers with attorneys who are trained up in other volunteers who answer the phones or help voters in person because that's just a constant threat my theory has been that that happens anytime there's a close election like the data point you shared about when it really comes down to not that many votes people have more at stake and they're more likely to try to a campaign our candidate is more likely to cross the line in terms of what's allowed to get a few voters because it could make the difference about whether they win or lose I still think my theory is is pretty much correct about you know we all heard about elections in 2019 in the city and suburbs where people elected officials literally won by a few votes but another theory I heard recently from a lobbyist is that when there are jobs to be handed out that in thinking about the context of Chicago and Illinois politics especially that's when there is this vulnerability to misinformation of voters and manipulation of voters or outright vote buying or forcing which happens today unfortunately probably at a much more miniscule level than it happened in the history of Chicago but it still happens today so we have to remain vigilant if there are players out there who are eager for a certain person to get elected into office so that they have some sway about who gets on the payroll that's another very real sort of political pressure that's out there

https://youtu.be/O78jCdLCHsg

[votingrightslawyers-com]

50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act | Hillary Clinton

Fifty years ago the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. I came of age as the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to not only change laws but change hearts. Generations of Americans fought and marched and organized and prayed, to expand the circle of freedom and opportunity. They never gave up and they never backed down. The six hundred marchers that crossed that bridge, what they fought for for the Voting Rights Act, that's under attack right now. The Court seems like it has decided to kill this pillar of the Voting Rights Act today. What is happening, is a sweeping effort to dis-empower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other. We should do everything we can to make it easier for every citizen to vote. Congress should move quickly to restore the full protections that American voters need and deserve. We should set a standard across our country of at least twenty days of early in-person voting everywhere. Now yes, this is about Democracy but it's also about dignity. We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to fight just as hard as those who came before us, to march just as far, to organize just as well, to speak out just as loudly and to vote every chance we get for the kid of future we want.

https://youtu.be/2UHJjZhMPJM

[votingrightslawyers-com]

Dr. Gloria Browne-Marshall - Voting Rights and Voter Suppression

One of the things that you have to understand about voting rights is that the oppression or this this sense of what a vote is. I see the vote as a voice. A voice that determines how a community is to be led. What will be the standards? And we know that the culture has certain rules and regulations to maintain itself and we call it law. So here we have the English law. Part of the ability to be in the lawmaking position is to have a vested interest in the village in the colony. And to show or prove that vested interest is to own land. In 1865 we know the Civil War ended. And I'm in Arkansas and so i won't go into great detail about the outcome. Some people say the South lost. I'm just going to say it quickly and move on. All right (laughter) however part of this outcome is what do we do with the millions of Africans who are now free. The debate in the White House was one of fear. Idea of sending them off to a colony in Haiti... sending them to Africa. What do we do? And then the question was even if we give them citizenship rights should we give them the right to vote? But their voice will now be a voice in the political arena. Determining the outcome of our disputes and the future of our society. Are we willing to do that? That was the hottest debate.

https://youtu.be/WS79fLc5cHM