It's hard to get 60% for anything. It doesn't matter if it's red states, blue states, purple states. I think all Americans understand gerrymandering and all Americans hate gerrymandering. It's fundamentally cheating.

The problem is that gerrymandering from 1790 through 2000 is really just in its infancy. It's in its minor leagues

It's a cynical offshoot of democracy that's focused not on the will of the voters, but instead on shaping outcomes before the voters even cast their ballots.

American ideal.

When I look at the kinds of things that are coming out of the mouth of the President about voter fraud and about vote by mail, things that simply are not true, things that are contradicted by every single study on vote-by-mail that ensures us that this is not a partisan issue, and that this does not create the problem of voter fraud. I worry that we are heading down a dangerous road.

But I also think that we ought to take a lot of heart and optimism from the tens of millions of Americans who came out in the 2018 election and voted for fairness for free elections. Democrats, Republicans, independents in red states and blue states and purple states, that said 'we believe in free elections and fairness.' That that is an American ideal.

What I worry about, though, is that the voting rights war in this country has only become more serious and more polarized and more hard-fought over the course of this last decade.

And then what we saw was that the U.S. Supreme Court jumped in and enforced a deadline that essentially forced many voters to stand in line if they wanted to have their votes be heard.

What I worry about is that there could be many other Wisconsins this fall, in which election officials are overwhelmed by the number of requests for absentee ballots and they're simply not able to get all of these ballots out to people and voters aren't able to send them all back.

What I'm seeing is that Republicans have been really slow-walking both in states and in Congress on most efforts to adapt vote by mail

A lot of people are viewing what happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday as a warning sign for our elections this November, but I would go a step further. I would say that what we just saw was a Republican dress rehearsal for the kind of voter suppression techniques we could well see this fall.

And with the exception of Utah, where it's an extraordinarily close victory, all of the other wins are over 60% in a nation that has become as polarized as this

There were five initiatives on gerrymandering in the 2018 election. And they happen in unexpected places: Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, Utah and Missouri. So red states, purple states.

It's 4000 volunteers. They go out, they collect more than 425,000 signatures and they get this on the ballot there and they win with more than 60% of the vote.

In Michigan, you had a young woman named Katie Fahey, who was 27 years old, worked at a recycling nonprofit, who gets up two days after the 2016 election and wants to work on something truly nonpartisan in her state. She posted a message on Facebook and says, 'I want to do something about gerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to join me, sign up here.'

What we have now, though, are Americans standing up and fighting back in really amazing ways.

I think people in politics talked about gerrymandering earlier this decade as being a problem of geography. Democrats simply living more clustered in cities and Republicans more efficiently spread out across suburbs and rural areas.

Oh, it's been wonderful to see. If you had told me that John Oliver would be making jokes about gerrymandering or that it would work its way into sports terminology. I read one piece in Sports Illustrated where they talk about a baseball manager gerrymandering his bullpen. Americans really understand the importance of these district lines now.

You can start with the census and all of the information that's available on demographics. And then you're able to add so much more on top of that. Some of it is public record data sets: driver's licenses, the kind of car you drive, gun ownership.

And then there's all of the kind of private data sets that can be overlaid as well. Magazine subscriptions, information that can be gleaned off of social media, the kinds of things we leave about ourselves as we travel around the Internet that marketers and political firms and mapmakers can buy up for pennies on the dollar. And as they draw maps and go up and down the street, they've got a very, very high level of confidence about how people in each of those homes vote and what the impact is of moving a line a block or two in any direction.

In 2010, gerrymandering moves into its steroids era. It is highly sophisticated computer software. It's the kinds of mapping software that enables Americans to never have to ask for directions again.

Republicans held many more states in 2011 and they launched a really sophisticated redistricting operation during the 2010 elections to ensure that that would be the case. I think that Democrats are now just as aware of this process as Republicans were in 2010.

think [the technology] is one reason why we overlooked gerrymandering as a problem in our politics for so long. It's been with us forever. You can trace it back to Patrick Henry trying to draw James Madison out of the very first Congress.

I think what we saw in 2011 is that whenever one party controls the entire process, what you end up with are maps that wildly favor that side.

And that really allows lawmakers in many states where one party controls the entire process to absolutely run amok without fear that the Supreme Court will step in and say that these partisan lines have gone too far.

We have seen how aggressively politicians of both parties have clung to their rigged maps over the course of this decade without any worry that the Supreme Court could step in and bring some fairness to this issue.

What I worry about, however, is that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims are non-justiciable and they closed the federal courts to these kinds of cases in the next decade.

And in Michigan as well, you had an independent commission pass in 2018.

In 2011, Republicans had really a 5-to-1 advantage when it came to drawing congressional lines. They had complete authority in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida to draw not only all of the congressional districts, but state legislative ones as well. There's going to be a slightly more level playing field in 2021.

Daley's new book, Unrigged, is out now.

We talk a lot about Dr. Martin Luther King's moral arc of the universe being long, but bending towards justice.

people like Desmond Meade in Florida, who helped former felons get their voting power back, and Katie Fahay, who started a redistricting revolution with a Facebook post.

"If you're a Republican, you look at [2010] and say, boy, this was effective, it was efficient and we won. We played by the rules. We changed the rules, but we still played by the law and the game," Daley told NPR in 2016. "And if the Democrats weren't smart enough to figure this out themselves, well, see you in 2020, boys."

David Dale

gave a play-by-play account of REDMAP, the Republican plan to take over state legislatures in the 2010 election cycle,

In 2012, Democratic congressional candidates in Pennsylvania for instance garnered 51% of the overall vote

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