End Gerrymandering with Ballot Initiatives: Katie Fahey

JUNE 23, 2022

“Everyone feels like they're not being listened to and there's no accountability.”

Katie Fahey is the Executive Director of The People, an organization working to find common ground and take action to create a more responsive government of, by, and for the people. In 2016, Katie founded Voters Not Politicians, an organization that successfully organized and passed a ballot initiative to end gerrymandering in Michigan in 2018. We discuss the appetite for non-partisan civic engagement and more accountability from elected representatives.

Voters Not Politicians swelled to 14,000 non-partisan volunteers that gathered 425,000 signatures in support of an independent redistricting commission for Michigan. Most Americans agree that politics should be fair and that our democracy should be strong. Ending gerrymandering is an effort that unites Democrats, Republicans, and Independents towards those goals.

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Credits:

Host: Mila Atmos 
Guest: Katie Fahey
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham

• Transcript

  Katie Fahey Transcript

  Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. For a free 14 day trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features, go to Shopify.com/hopeful.

  Mila Atmos: [00:00:23] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. This week's guest is pretty much the embodiment of turning a big idea into an action item for everyday people. Katie Fahey is the kind of citizen changemaker that reminds me why we do the show and how we can all do our part. Katie saw a problem and she drew ordinary people together to fix it. The problem was gerrymandering in her home state of Michigan. That's a practice of drawing voting districts to benefit one political party. Gerrymandering is a problem in a lot of places, but Michigan's gerrymanders were pretty egregious. So Katie founded Voters Not Politicians, an organization that swelled to 14,000 non-partisan volunteers. And they gathered 425,000 signatures in support of an independent redistricting commission for Michigan. On November 6, 2018, the state electorate voted overwhelmingly to pass Proposal 2, establishing the Commission. And then, at the end of December 2021, Michigan's Independent Redistricting Commission voted to adopt new maps for congressional and state legislative districts. Today, Katie Fahey is an Independent voter who continues to work for nonpartisan political reform as executive director of the People, which is a national organization working for a refocused vision for a country once again of, by, and for the people. Katie, welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.

  Katie Fahey: [00:02:12] Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

  Mila Atmos: [00:02:15] So tell us a little bit about that first campaign. What was the

  spark that made you think "I have to do something about this"?

  Katie Fahey: [00:02:22] You know, I had remembered learning about gerrymandering in school, and I knew that it bothered me. It didn't make sense that it existed. I really felt like voters should be the ones choosing their politicians, not the other way around. But I didn't know what to do about it. I voted, but I didn't really get involved too much

  politically beyond that. But in Michigan, you know, there was kind of a series of events. We had the Flint water crisis, which actually has its roots in gerrymandering, where basically the people of our state tried to overturn a law that got reinstated by our government and then later accidentally led to the poisoning of an entire city because of their water contamination. There was just a lot of chaos. And around the 2016 election, a lot of my friends and family for the first time were getting really excited to vote and I was really excited about that because most of the time I was begging them to vote or to actually show up to the polls. And then the election happened and everybody started turning fairly angry at each other based on who they voted for and whether the person they liked won or didn't. But what I realized is that a lot of the reason why people were voting for the first time in 2016 is because they were seeing candidates who are talking about really big changes to the system, talking about either draining the swamp or having the political revolution.

  Katie Fahey: [00:03:39] To me, I thought, yes, you can vote for somebody to try and make that happen. But also there's like fundamental changes we can make to our democracy that can also really help get more accountability to us, the people, one of which is gerrymandering. So as I was thinking about, you know, how can I maybe have a good Thanksgiving dinner where my family isn't arguing about who they voted for? How can we maybe try and get more accountability for the actual citizens of people in our state, like the ones who are not getting any accountability, like in Flint? I made a post on social media. I did not actually think it would lead to amending the state constitution, but my post said, "Hey, I want to end gerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to help, let me know. Smiley face emoji." And that's when I started to see that I actually wasn't alone in caring about this. There were actually thousands of people like me who also really didn't like gerrymandering but didn't know where to start.

  Mila Atmos: [00:04:32] I want to backtrack a little bit about Flint, because what is the law that was inadvertently reinstated so that accidentally people in Flint were poisoned by their own water? Because it feels to me that even partisans don't mean to poison people.

  Katie Fahey: [00:04:50] Yes, nobody, to my knowledge, purposely did. Although information about the poisoning happening was hidden. It was the emergency manager law, which basically meant if a city was in financial trouble, their elected leaders were no

  longer in place and the state appointed somebody to make their decisions. One of the decisions that was made by that emergency manager in Flint was to switch where Flint's water source was coming from, from the Detroit River. And the water that it got switched to was corroding the pipes which were made of lead, which then led to lead being in the water.

  Mila Atmos: [00:05:24] Oh, I see. And so now that there are new maps, are there new leaders, or how has this been resolved?

  Katie Fahey: [00:05:31] Yeah, I mean, Flint is still kind of ongoing in and of itself. But basically for that piece, there was a law that the people tried to overturn and then new legislators, as soon as they were elected, found a loophole and reinstated the emergency manager law. Now, why would you reinstate something that the majority of people in your state just voted against? Because you're in a gerrymandered district and you're not actually afraid of losing the vote. You know that more people in your district are for sure going to vote for your party over another. And now that we have new maps in general, we should see a lot more accountability from our politicians. There's less guaranteed races, many more races that are actually up to the voters showing up. And a Democrat could get elected or a Republican could get elected, when before the number of competitive seats had been very limited because of gerrymandering.

  Mila Atmos: [00:06:17] Right. Right. Well, trying to tackle gerrymandering as an everyday person is really a tall order. And so you mentioned that that first Facebook post and how you didn't expect it to lead to this change. So walk us through how you build a campaign for an independent redistricting commission.

  Katie Fahey: [00:06:35] Yeah, so my Facebook post started to get traction and that's when I really had to Google. "Wait, how do you end gerrymandering?" You know, I knew I didn't like it. I knew I didn't want gerrymandering, but I didn't actually know about things like independent citizens redistricting commissions. And I hadn't really thought about how do I want the lines to be drawn that determine our districts. So as I started seeing a lot of people were interested in this, I made an online group, a Facebook group where people could join. And I kind of made up what I thought we needed in a political campaign. I was like, Okay, guess we probably need a marketing group and we probably need a committee that's going to focus on the actual legal aspects of this, and

  maybe one that focuses on education and one on fundraising. And I kind of mimicked it off of, at the time I worked for a Fortune 500 company, so I just mimicked it off of like corporate America and having different departments and people who kind of knew something about those departments to help lead them.

  Katie Fahey: [00:07:28] But upon my research, I realized that Michigan is one of about 26 states in our country that has this citizen led ballot initiative process, meaning if citizens can come together and write their own law and in our case, write our own constitutional language, then if they gather a bunch of signatures for us, we had to gather over 315,654 registered Michigan voter signatures in 180 days. Then you could actually put up a law to all of the people to vote on in the general election, meaning that are currently benefiting from gerrymandered legislature couldn't interfere with our bill. The people of Michigan got to directly vote on it instead of it having to go through the traditional legislative process. So once we figured out we had the citizen led ballot initiative process, that's when we started getting to work, figuring out how are we going to gather all these signatures, how are we going to write constitutional language, and how are we ultimately going to get at least around two and one half million people to vote yes on wanting to end gerrymandering and install something new.

  Mila Atmos: [00:08:30] Right, so this is a multistep process. First you had to get the ballot signatures, right? So how do you get that many signatures in 180 days? Because that's not really a long time.

  Katie Fahey: [00:08:40] It actually all started when we were trying to write constitutional language. So we did a bunch of research. We saw best practices, talked to people in other states who had anything that wasn't just politicians determining who their voters were. And we learned from that, but we still saw that we were just a group of people online trying to figure this out. And we felt like if we're going to amend the Constitution, we really want to make sure that the people of Michigan are bought into this and that it's something that people want. Part of the problem with gerrymandering is it's a bunch of elected officials that people may not want actually getting elected, and we didn't want to replicate that kind of process. So we actually toured around the entire state. We made sure we went to each of our congressional districts at least twice. So we ended up doing 33 town halls in 33 days, where we talked about "what the heck is gerrymandering? What is it specifically look like in Michigan? What does it look like in states that have

  gotten rid of gerrymandering and what could it look like here in the future?" And we actually had long discussions and then documented what people felt like they wanted. If we did have an independent commission, who should serve on it? Should they have a high school degree? Should they all be allowed to be from the same city? Should they be able to be politicians or not? All these kind of questions we asked. We also asked, how do you want the lines drawn? What kind of criteria should it be based on? Should it be population? Should it be geography? Should we just have a computer do it? Like what do we want that to look like? And lastly, we asked people about what do you want the actual process to look like? Do you want to participate in it? Do you want the data to all be made public? How many days do we think is appropriate for something like this to happen over? And while doing that, we talked about, now the only way that any of this change that all of you guys are helping us basically crowdsource and create our constitutional amendment.

  Katie Fahey: [00:10:28] The only way that can happen is if we gather these signatures and we figured out that 315,654 is a very intimidating number. But if you break it down into saying, well, actually, if we get like 700 people who can gather about 15 signatures a week for X number of weeks, we can actually get way more signatures, and actually finish way ahead of the deadline. So as we started talking at these town halls about the need for a bunch of us to just do a little bit, that's when people's eyes started opening to, "Oh, maybe I actually could help" because we had a lot of people showing up to these meetings who didn't even necessarily know what gerrymandering was. They just knew they were frustrated with the political system, but they also were struggling to see how can I, somebody who cares but doesn't really know a lot about this, and who votes but hasn't really done anything political before -- a lot like me -- like they were all kind of having this idea of like, will me showing up even matter?

  Katie Fahey: [00:11:23] And that's where, especially with signature gathering, we couldn't have done it unless thousands of people got out of their house and were willing to talk to strangers about this. We found a lot of innovative ways from there. We went outside of our Secretary of State's office where people renew their voting registration and get their licenses. We actually figured out what rest stops, like car rest stops in our state, were most busy during Thanksgiving and the day after because that's the highest travel day. And we set up little tables at each of those because those are public property and we stop people and talk to them about gerrymandering. And between Thanksgiving

  dinner, we went to football games and there were tractor races up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There were cheeseburger festivals. But basically we just tried to figure out "where are there a lot of people who might want to talk about democracy?" And that's how we ended up gathering so many signatures. And one of the parts I'm most proud of is because we did those town halls all across the state, we are actually one of the only ballot initiatives that got signatures from every single county. We have 83 counties in Michigan. There isn't any kind of requirement. You know, all of your signatures could just be from one city or one place if enough people lived there and were registered to vote there. But we actually got some from a little piece of every part of Michigan, which just made it really feel like this was truly something that the people of our state wanted. All of the people.

  Mila Atmos: [00:12:43] Wow. Very, very impressive. It sounds like you're really an organizing mastermind to figure out how you're going to get all the people to come together and how every single person can do a little bit. Just get 15 signatures. Right. That seems totally doable for each person and help the campaign. So it sounds like you have always been civically engaged and that you've been passionate about democracy and representation before the gerrymandering campaign or anti gerrymandering campaign, I should say. You were encouraging people to vote. But why did you pick gerrymandering in particular to tackle? Because there are plenty of other challenges. For example, you could be advocating for people to have automatic voter registration or something like that.

  Katie Fahey: [00:13:25] Yeah, it just felt like the older that I got, you know, I had recently been out of college, but I had been able to vote in a couple of different elections by that time. And I kept seeing that basically Michigan wasn't making a lot of change very quickly. And because we're a purple state, sometimes we have Democrats in charge, sometimes we have Republicans in charge. And it seemed like no matter what party is in charge, nothing's really happening. And a lot of people were really frustrated that they weren't feeling paid attention to by anyone, that it was more corporate interests or party politics rather than actually having representation in our state capitol and in Washington, DC. So when I started to think about how could we try and make progress on a bunch of the issues I cared about water, roads, education, environmental aspects, you know, all these major issues that kind of they take long term compromise between Democrats and Republicans. They take multiple generations of legislators. We have

  term limits in our state, you know, being able to actually work on this, to actually make progress, and I started to think about I care about all these issues. I want accountability on all of them. But it feels exhausting to try and volunteer for something on every single issue. When I looked at gerrymandering, if we could actually hold our politicians more accountable to us, meaning they were more afraid of our vote, and that if we could actually have a legislature that is reflective of the will of the people in Michigan, then ideally we could actually have more accountability on all of these issues because they're popular issues. Everybody cares about these issues. Maybe not every single person, but the majority of people in our state, poll after poll that shows we care about infrastructure, we care about education, we care about jobs, yet we're not seeing progress on it. So hopefully, if we can start with gerrymandering, it's not a silver bullet. It doesn't fix everything overnight, but it helps give us a legislature that has more incentive to actually listen to the will of the people and have to be responsive to them, otherwise they won't get re-elected.

  Mila Atmos: [00:15:24] We are taking a short break to thank our sponsor. And when we come back, Katie will share how she managed to draw so many people into her campaign.

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  Mila Atmos: [00:18:01] And now let's return to our conversation with Katie Fahey. So you talked about how a lot of the people who you met during the campaign for the commission didn't really know what gerrymandering even is. It's not really necessarily something that's top of mind for everyday people. So what do you think drew people to your campaign and, you know, show up to the town hall? Beyond your organizing, what made it possible to draw so many people together?

  Katie Fahey: [00:18:28] You know, if there's one thing that Americans agree on and now that I've kind of stepped out of Michigan with our organization, The People, and been able to talk to people in all 50 states, it's that no one is happy with the state of politics in America, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, whether it was 2016, 2020, 2022, no one's happy. Everybody feels like it could be better. Everyone feels like they're not being listened to and there's no accountability. So starting there and starting with "Do we want more government accountability?" Or like, "do you feel like you want to actually help fix Lansing is our state capital or Washington, D.C.?" Those kinds of phrases are really what kind of stop people and that there was something we could actually tangibly do about it. I think people knew instinctually that something is fundamentally broken. And if we just keep voting and thinking that voting is the only solution, that we're going to keep getting more of the same. So I think that's kind of what the on-ramp was. And at the time too, it was a very contentious election in 2016, especially in Michigan. And I think people were also really hungry to talk about something that wasn't partisan, that they were really sick of. "Okay, I'm a Democrat, so I

  must hate Republicans or I'm a Republican, so I must hate Democrats." Like we have a lot of people with split families where maybe spouses vote differently or children and parents vote differently. And I think that because of all that turmoil and negativity, just a lot of people were hungry to be like, "I don't like the state of politics right now and I want to do something about it. But I really just don't want to volunteer for party A or party B."

  Mila Atmos: [00:20:03] Right. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It's it's for sure true that people want to have solutions as opposed to hating the other side. Let's talk about the solutions, right. That's way more interesting. So what did you learn from that first campaign in Michigan and how does that inform your work nationally now?

  Katie Fahey: [00:20:22] Oh, I learned so much everything from what the heck Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission is to how to organize, to how to have to go and have a lawsuit brought against you. You know, as I think about some of the most major lessons, one of them really was that point I was just talking about, that there is a real lack of political opportunities for people to volunteer on that are genuinely nonpartisan. There's a lot of groups that kind of I mean, they are fighting against gerrymandering are they are fighting for more voting rights. And they say that they're nonpartisan. But when you show up to one of their meetings, if you happen to not vote the way they do, you understand pretty quickly you might not be welcome. And our campaign was different. I mean, it was because I didn't want to go to Thanksgiving dinner. Like I wanted something we purposely could come together and be able to have like a safe place for Democrats, Republicans, Independents, people who weren't voting yet, all that kind of thing to come and just talk about what kind of system do we want, what kind of government do we want? And seeing how healing that was not only for my family, but many families. We had a group of sisters, one a Democrat, one a Republican, one an Independent. And they said this is the first thing that any of them could volunteer on together politically in their entire lifetime and how much they enjoyed it and actually liked being able to spend time together again.

  Katie Fahey: [00:21:42] And we just saw that in community after community, you know, I'd be at a door talking to somebody about what this proposal was and they'd be like, Well, if my neighbor has a yard sign for it, there's no way that I'm going to vote for it, too. And after the end of the conversation, they'd be like, Actually, I'm totally for that. And then they'd be like, I had no idea that, you know, a Democrat could believe in

  fairness or a Republican could want every vote to count equally. You know, some of these things that because my family has mixed political beliefs, I knew that those ideas weren't true, that like lots of people believe in fairness and want America to be strong and all of that. But seeing that happen kind of over and over again in communities across our state, it had such an impact on me for just recognizing that the issues we're talking about are very important, the kinds of reform issues, but also how we are organizing, actually creating a place where people of different political opinions can come together and feel like they can work on a shared American project, a joint venture in wanting to create a more accountable and responsive government. I think there's just a huge opportunity and a lot of people who are really hungry for that, who care about politics again, but don't necessarily want to volunteer on Team A or Team B, but they really do want to be active citizens and they're looking for more volunteer opportunities.

  Mila Atmos: [00:22:54] That's great. Well, I have a follow up question on that, which is, aside from gerrymandering, what are people talking to you about now? What are they really invested in trying to fix, you know, as non partisans?

  Katie Fahey: [00:23:06] Yes, I think primaries is a big one. A lot of people recognize that all voters pay for the primaries, just like we pay for all of our elections. But in a lot of states, independent voters actually can't participate in primaries because they don't want to say if they're a Democrat or Republican because they're not a Democrat or Republican, or even people who are Democrats and Republicans might, for their state election, want to vote for one party yet and their a local election vote for a different party. And so wanting to look at how do we actually maybe update the primary system so that we aren't just having very small percentages of our population actually deciding who the final candidates are expanding, how many voters are actually involved in that process is a huge one. Also election kind of security and access. We tend to deal with that together. So making sure that all people who are eligible to vote actually can vote in a fairly easy way, but also making sure that we're having secure elections, making sure that people actually understand what is the proper audit process, what are the checks and balances within our election system, and how do we make sure that they are keeping up with 21st century technology? All of that and then also ideas around the the first past the post process. So a lot of people who are interested in ranked choice voting. So how could we actually vote for which candidate we like first, second, third and have more of our votes count across political parties trying to make it more competitive?

  Really, how do you help more third party candidates, maybe the less traditional candidates actually have a fighting chance or feeling like you aren't throwing away your vote if you do want to vote for one of them so that voters have more power in that way. And of course, campaign finance, too. That's another thing that across the board, a lot of people feel like money and politics is a really huge issue and they're very motivated to try and do something about it.

  Mila Atmos: [00:24:55] Right. Right. Well, all of that is right up our alley. In fact, we've done episodes on ranked choice voting and open primaries. We spoke to Michigan's secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, and we also have spoken to Jeff Clements about getting money out of politics. So that's very exciting altogether. And of course, this conversation about gerrymandering. So there's a lot happening right now around gerrymandering still. We're in a midterm election year after the census. Can you tell us where we are, like is it getting worse or better? And where are the areas where you're worried and where are the areas where you're celebrating?

  Katie Fahey: [00:25:30] Yeah. So in 2018, when we passed our ballot initiative, there were actually five other states who worked on redistricting reform as well, which is really exciting. We had Ohio and Utah, Colorado, Missouri, just most recently Virginia also passing reform. All of those were different levels of reform in Ohio and in Virginia. They kind of had to compromise with the legislature to come up with solutions. But what's been really great in Virginia in particular, you know, the the politicians put up on the ballot initiative, which is very rare, that they wanted at least citizens involved in the process. It was a messy process. Redistricting is very messy, but ultimately the courts ended up coming back and making sure that for the first time they really had more fair maps, which is super exciting. Michigan was an extremely exciting process. We had just under 10,000 people actually apply to be on the commission. So, you know, you have to think about most people don't even know what the heck the redistricting commission is. Maybe they voted on it, but okay, I'm going to go volunteer months of my time to go serve on this thing. But we had tons of people so excited to apply and our new maps came out at the beginning of the year and it's really exciting because it's they're truly competitive, actually reflective of the voters in our state. The Democrats aren't happy, the Republicans aren't happy, which I think is a sign of a great map because nobody was supposed to really feel like it benefited them. So it's very exciting. And like in Colorado, you've got some great maps that are coming out too. And one of the other

  things I'll just say is that the amount of activism around redistricting has been huge, even in states where they don't have the ballot initiative process, like North Carolina and Wisconsin, you have thousands of people showing up demanding fair maps.

  Katie Fahey: [00:27:14] Now, unfortunately, it's then left up to the legislature and then in both of those cases, the Supreme Court as well. And there's some interesting things happening on the Supreme Court level, sometimes kicking it back down to the state, sometimes wanting to rule or not rule. It's really interesting. I think the story to kind of pay attention to over the next 2 to 4 years will be court cases being brought at the local level, saying that partisan or racial gerrymandering has happened. Sometimes you need election cycles to prove that like you can run example elections ahead of time, like with computer software that gets pretty close to most likely what the election results will be in a certain state. So you can actually determine that before election. But sometimes there's better proof after an election has happened to show, hey, look, you know, this many people voted for this party, yet only this many people got actually appointed to seats. And that's... so that's kind of happening right now. And then there's a few states because of COVID and because of the census who actually have delayed redistricting. And they won't actually be working on the process until next year to get new maps. So some states are going to have old maps for another cycle. So I think even being able to truly understand the impact of gerrymandering for this next 2022 to 2030 time frame, we probably have to wait 2 to 4 years to really see the true impact until all of those maps are up.

  Mila Atmos: [00:28:33] Yeah, it'll take time. I mean, the work takes time and then the results will take time.

  Katie Fahey: [00:28:37] Yes. Yeah.

  Mila Atmos: [00:28:39] So I'd love for you to talk about the organization that you're

  leading now, The People. What are you working on over there?

  Katie Fahey: [00:28:45] Yeah. So The People is all about trying to help people who are like me in Michigan, people who knew that they wanted to make a change. Maybe they know specifically what they want to do. Like maybe they know it's gerrymandering or ranked choice voting or primary reform, but they haven't done it before and they're

  looking for tools, resources, other citizens who care about that issue. And we really want to help them be able to navigate the political process. We got lucky in a lot of ways where we happen to talk to the right person at the right time, figured out the political process just in the nick of time. But between campaign finance laws and the technicality of how do you make sure something is constitutional or isn't being able to look at how to organize all that? We put so much work into building non partisan tools that at the end of the campaign a bunch of us looked at each other and said, we want to pay it forward. We want to make it easier for the next group of citizens who wants to come and make a difference. So we're really focused on helping people get connected to those tools and those processes. We're also working on a lot of exciting election stuff. We have a great facilitator training where if there's people who are looking to hold conversations within their community or even at their kitchen table with people with different political opinions, we have a training to teach you how to do that, how to kind of set that agenda, how to be the person who's hosting that conversation. Because we found that there's a lot of people eager to do that, but they don't always have practice with diverse political groups. And we can help give you practice. And they also are sometimes intimidated by what that might look like or feeling prepared to do that. So we're excited to be offering that right now as well.

  Mila Atmos: [00:30:20] Lots of good tools. So this is kind of an aside, but I've been thinking about registered Independents and we talked about this just now and how often you find them working on election and democracy reform. And I was speculating that maybe it's because you actually have more of a vested interest in fixing what's broken because you're not a party member. What do you think?

  Katie Fahey: [00:30:40] I think that could be really true. I think there's a lot of even if they aren't necessarily Independents, like a lot of Moderates who I see that like volunteered, too. I just feel like moderates and independents in a lot of ways don't feel represented. They don't see people on TV talking to them. They don't see candidates running who are talking to them. It's not really the quote unquote winning strategy for how to win an election right now is to kind of stay in the middle or to, not that Independents are all in the middle, but or to not just be super tied to a party. So I think, again, it's at least for my own personal perspective, like I really care about the country. I have, since I was very small. I want our democracy to thrive and I'm hungry to see what I can do. I know that I can do something, so I'm hungry to figure out what I can do. And

  it's not appealing to want to go help either of the parties. So that's why I at least personally find myself in the reform space.

  Mila Atmos: [00:31:36] Are there a lot of Independents with you? Do you find that you're joined by a lot of Independents?

  Katie Fahey: [00:31:41] I do, yeah. And with The People, you know, we also host a lot of -- our organization, The People -- we also host a lot of like conversations or topics where people can talk to each other. And what's interesting is a lot of our volunteers, they happen to be the minority opinion in where they live. So we have a lot of like Republicans from New York City or a lot of Democrats from like rural Indiana who are coming. And I think as I've talked to a lot of our volunteers, you know, it sounds like a lot of them just feel really misunderstood. They feel characterized. They feel villainized in a lot of ways. And they're trying to show like, hey, I want to talk to you if people with different political beliefs that I'm surrounded by. And I also want to show you like I'm not all the stereotypes you have in your head. And so at least on that end, I see a lot of people kind of yeah joining us that way and then a lot of Independents who are very frustrated with not feeling represented.

  Mila Atmos: [00:32:32] Yeah, I can see that. Independents not feeling represented, for sure. That is true. And of course, they are the fastest growing demographic, politically speaking, in this country. So it's great that more people who are independent, who are jumping in and reforming our democracy. I have a question about the town hall meetings that you had to persuade people to join your campaign to end gerrymandering. So if I were to show up, what is the first thing you said and how did you persuade people there to join you and gather signatures and get on the bandwagon and help you, you know?

  Katie Fahey: [00:33:04] Gerrymandering. Once people understand, it kind of sells itself. When you hear that politicians are literally getting to choose who their voters are going to be before an election, most people are like, "that's wrong. I don't think that's okay." But getting people to actually remember, what is that word I maybe heard in school once or twice and definitely have forgotten since that's where we really started. We started with the basics, like what even is a district, what districts are we talking about? Like are we talking about state senators? No, we're not, because they aren't drawn into

  districts. It's just your state boundary. But we are talking about Congress in most states if you have more than one congressperson; and we are talking about your state senate and your state house, but just taking the time to not make people feel like they should have to know all of that information first was actually really key to, I think, helping people feel comfortable to ask the questions they needed to ask, to feel convinced that this was worth their time. Because the Flint water crisis, which we started talking about, the emergency manager law, had been removed through a ballot initiative process. So a lot of people showing up to these meetings said, you know, I tried to help with that and it didn't matter. Anyways, it got overturned by the legislature. So there was a bunch of education we had to do about how this is going to be different. And also just being realistic about here's the places where it's going to be really hard. Like we are probably going to have millions of dollars spent against us and they're probably going to lie about who we are. And all of that ended up being true.

  Katie Fahey: [00:34:26] And when we started we didn't have a bank account yet and it's like even to print petitions cost $40,000. I did not have $40,000 just lying around to spend on paper, but you know, being able to talk about all that and I think breaking down the steps to kind of the... Step one, write constitutional language. Step two, gather signatures. Step three, get people to vote on it. There's a lot of things in politics and a lot of issues right now where there's not as clear cut of a process. And it makes it really hard to feel like if I am going to be giving up watching Netflix tonight or going and volunteering at the animal shelter or spending time with the people I love, like, is it going to be worth it? And being able to lay out the plan for how you are going to be successful if people show up and and specifically why they have to show up. So again, going back to like if we don't get 700 people who can gather 15 signatures for however many weeks, like this won't work. So people really understanding exactly how they mattered. That all made the difference. So it's not like one clear thing that we did, but I think it is like explaining the steps and then explaining specifically how people have to be involved in the ways they have to be involved. You know, we need everybody to give $10 and everybody to gather 15 signatures. And, you know, there's a lot more that had to happen. But those were really easy ways that, if we didn't get literally thousands of people to decide to do that, we wouldn't have been successful.

  Mila Atmos: [00:35:48] Yeah, you created the easy building blocks for everybody to participate in. So of course now you're an expert. But when you started, you weren't.

  Give us two pieces of advice, two action items for regular people who want to get involved.

  Katie Fahey: [00:36:01] So my first piece advice is, even if it's out redistricting reform, figure out what your issue is. There are so many issues and the news cycle is constant. And I'm sure if you're listening to a podcast like this, you have a heart that cares about a lot of things. But the reality is you can only do so much with your own limited time and so help support the other things financially or whatever. But whatever you want to solely focus on, it takes commitment. Even from Facebook post to election was about two years and then from election to actually having fair maps was another two years. Slowly this has been like one fifth of my life has now been taken out by gerrymandering, even though, you know, it feels like I made the Facebook post yesterday and it's been completely worth it. But there were so many times when other people told me, you know, you should care more about this issue or this issue or this issue. And if I would have gone and done that, then I don't think redistricting reform would have ever gotten done. We needed actual focus and to make sure we got that win before we can move on to the next one. And for redistricting reform, I really do think it can be an intimidating issue. So start with the basics of like how are lines drawn in your state? Is it the legislature? Is the governor involved? Do you have an independent commission? Do you have maybe a city commission? And then what are the steps where you can actually have your voice heard? Do they hold public hearings about the maps before they're drawn? Can you go and meet with your legislator? Because there might be a piece of legislation that needs more votes.

  Katie Fahey: [00:37:29] That's for an independent commission. There's about 13 states left that have ballot initiative processes that could you know, a citizen could do exactly what we did in Michigan. You could write constitutional language, gather signatures and put it on the ballot. So is that an option? And likely there are people in your state who might already be working on it, too. If you don't want to just start something from scratch, you can always go and look for those people as well. And you know, I was in a film called Slay the Dragon, which is on Hulu, but it really goes into detail about both what it looks like on the ground to fight gerrymandering as well as what it looks like in the courts to fight gerrymandering. So that might be another good first stop for people. If you're kind of looking for what are the actual pathways, what can I do about this and what are the solutions.

  Mila Atmos: [00:38:14] All good advice. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?

  Katie Fahey: [00:38:19] After Michigan, you know, I thought in my head maybe this was just lightning in a bottle. Maybe I just happened to make a Facebook post on the right day. Maybe because we're a purple state, there's a lot of Independents or there's a lot of Moderates or whatever. Or in the Midwest, we like saying we're all Midwest nice. Like, we're just very polite. We don't want to talk about politics or religion. You know, I'm like, maybe we just had the right group of people to help care about this enough. But as I started to actually go around the country and be able to talk to people in all 50 states about the issues they cared about and about redistricting and everything, I started to see that there are literally millions of people who care, and I used to feel like I was the only one who cared. Like I actually had made a Facebook post a couple of years earlier saying almost the exact same thing, saying like, Hey, I want to end gerrymandering, but nobody even liked it. And I also didn't do anything about it afterwards. I just said like, Hey, I want to go do something. And then I didn't do it because I was like, Oh, nobody else cares. So I guess I won't care. But what I have started to see is that literally millions of people are willing to dedicate their time, their energy, their creativity, their passion to just trying to make the world a better place. Even if there isn't a guarantee that it's going to work, they're willing to show up, to talk to their neighbors, to hop in a conversation, to get trained, to host these conversations, to start a ballot initiative. There are so many people willing to actually do it, even though there's no guarantee it's going to be successful, even though all the odds might feel against you and all the dark money you might feel against you. But there really are so many of us who care, and I think we just have to find each other and we have to remember that we should always be extending an invitation out to other people to help join us in creating a better world. Every time I'm starting to feel overwhelmed, I just remember there are so many more of us who could fill a room who want a strong democracy than those who don't.

  Mila Atmos: [00:40:10] That is indeed very hopeful. I agree. I think there are a lot of people who care and a lot of people are willing to give up their time and their efforts to make our democracy more whole. Thank you for joining us.

  Katie Fahey: [00:40:20] Thank you.

  Mila Atmos: [00:40:21] Katie Fahey is the executive director of The People, a national organization working for a refocused vision for a country once again of, by, and for the people. We're taking a pause next week as we head into our summer of civic action and our friends at the podcast, Financial Confessions, will be popping into your feed. It's the antithesis of the finance bro show. Instead, Financial Confessions tackles sticky money issues with empathy and intelligence. So we're sharing a really cool episode they did about navigating our broken health care system, how being disabled affects one's finances, and what everyone should know about living with a disability in America. Then we're back on July 7th with a fresh conversation with Rachel Vindman, the host of the Suburban Women Problem podcast and wife of retired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.

  The Democracy Group: [00:41:30] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.