#hopefully more to come although network rise from their grave to try and fight me with ott copyright protection on their discs as usual

[thisbluespirit]

The Outfit's newest recruits leave for France in Wish Me Luck 1.2 (LWT 1988).

[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