David Daley on Unrigging American Democracy and the Hidden Power of Gerrymandering

In this eye-opening episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram sit down with journalist and election reform advocate David Daley to unpack one of the most misunderstood forces shaping American politics—gerrymandering. Daley explains how invisible district lines can determine not only who wins elections but how our representatives govern once in office.
Drawing on his investigative work and his books Ratf**ked and Unrigged, Daley details the Republican-led “Redmap” strategy that weaponized redistricting after the 2010 census, how both parties manipulate maps today, and why the result is a democracy where fewer than 10% of congressional races are truly competitive. 

The conversation also explores Trump’s proposed executive order on mail-in voting, the role of voter ID laws, the health of the Voting Rights Act, and the future of American electoral fairness.

Through it all, the hosts and Daley examine how Christians—and all citizens—can think faithfully about fairness, representation, and truth in an era where the rules of democracy itself are being rewritten.

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching on our YouTube channel, I am very, very happy to have you here. I'm your political host, Will Wright, joined by my ever faithful, faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? I'm doing great, thanks Will. And today we have with us David Daley. Excuse me, my voice is a little hoarse or something. So we have David Daley with us today. He's a senior fellow at Fair Vote and the author of two acclaimed books on American democracy. One is called Rat F K E D. I'll have to ask you what that means. uh Why your vote doesn't. uh Yes, it's a book that helped actually spark a movement to end partisan gerrymandering and unrigged. that Yeah, a lot of good that did right? His other book, Chronicle State Efforts to Protect Voting Rights, and he's appeared in all kinds of news and media outlets like the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, and has done a whole bunch of other really, really impressive stuff. But we're just going to ask him to explain himself. Like, you've got this wide career in journalism. Like, what was it about, you know, election reform and gerrymandering that made you want to make this your life's work? Yeah, it's amazing, right? I never would have imagined that in a lot of ways. But once you begin to look at at American politics through the lens of redistricting, uh it's awfully hard to stop. It opens your eyes to just how important these otherwise invisible lines are in determining who represents us and how they behave once they're in office. And my eyes were open to this when I was editor of Salon. I was running our politics team. And it was after the 2012 election. oh have you guys frozen on me? We're still here. I'm sorry. You both completely froze. And I just made stuff harder on your editors. Can you hear us now? Because it, it, we're. can hear you, but I couldn't hear anything and both of you just frozen blurriness. that's weird. um It's OK. All the files upload locally to your computer. So as long as you can hear us, the video will be fine. It's OK. Yeah, you're right. I'll go back to Salon and I'll start right there. It all started for me when I was editor of Salon. I was running our politics team. was not long after the 2012 election. were looking at really just, you know, I mean, I wasn't new to politics, but the dysfunction that followed that election. the 50-something votes to repeal Obamacare when you probably could have done one or two. ah I had grown up in Connecticut. We had just had our first son, and Sandy Hook happened. And certainly the politics of gun control are uh very complicated in this country. But boy, I thought if anything was going to uh lead to some kind of sensible dialogue or conversation, it might be that. And when it didn't happen, you know, One question I started asking was, well, why didn't Democrats take back the Congress, take back the House in 2012? When Obama's re-elected, Democrats gained seats in the US Senate, but it wasn't even close in the House. Republicans held a 234-201 edge. uh And I looked at some of the states, you know, Pennsylvania. which goes for Obama, but elects 13 Republicans and five Democrats. Ohio goes for Obama, but it's 12-4. Michigan, and it's 9-5. Virginia, and it's 8-3. North Carolina, and it's 9-4 in the House. And I said, well, how did that happen? And what I came across was a really fascinating Republican political strategy called Red Maps, where for the redistricting majority project, And the goal was to plot a path back to power through state legislatures because state legislatures draw congressional lines after the census. And if you can win control of state legislatures, oftentimes inexpensive, quiet races, no one realizes oftentimes that they have these bigger roles to play. oh And Republicans quite brilliantly oh recognized this, won those races. remap the nation, and I don't think you can really understand the politics of our country since then um without grappling with how that happened and how it's worked. Wow. So I just need to make sure I'm wrapping my mind around all this. Actually, one of the things that I had never even thought about gerrymandering. I mean, I had heard of it and I'm like, that sounds weird. Like, you know, it just sounds like cheating, like on both sides, right? It just sounds like, hey, let's cheat and then kind of both sides cheat. But what I hear you saying is that there was at least a uh concentration in the Republican. kind of... uh with a catalyst behind this idea. I'll give you a chance to correct me if I'm saying anything wrong. But I guess what I'm trying to think of, like even getting back to... the basics of this because I think this is so crucial to understand the argument that you're making. And I think if we don't get really get gerrymandering, we're not gonna understand what everything else you're saying. I think it'll be an idea. I would love for you to really describe and help us understand, help me and our audience understand what is gerrymandering and why is it so bad? Like, why is it an issue? If it seems like both sides are doing it, maybe they're not, help me understand. Go ahead, please. Sure. Big question. There's a lot there. Let me unpack it best I can. And if I miss something, I'll walk back through it. uh We've had gerrymandering as long as we've had politicians. You can trace it back to Patrick Henry trying to keep James Madison out of our very first Congress. uh It takes its name from Elbridge Gary with a hard G. He's the governor of Massachusetts in 1812 when his party, the Democratic Republicans, try to draw state Senate lines around Boston to keep the hated Federalists out of power. A political cartoonist takes a look at these districts, thinks that they look like a snake or a salamander, and it is called the gerrymander in his infamous honor. uh I love that. There are no redistricting angels. a long time, so district lines, however, uh have to be drawn any time you have a system that uses single member districts, right? As the US House does, as all state legislatures do, the courts have said that these districts essentially have to be equal in population. So every 10 years after the census, there's a population shift, right? States gain and lose seats, states populations change. And so districting is, and redistricting really is the job of trying to equalize population. It starts out of fairness. Gerrymandering comes into play when politicians take advantage of the process when they have control over it. and draw district lines that advantage their party and disadvantage the other side. The two main tools of this are called cracking and packing. So if you are Team Blue and you are trying to gerrymander the Republicans out of power, what you might do is draw one district in your state that the Republicans win overwhelmingly. Maybe they'll take 90 % of the vote there. What does that mean? It means that there are fewer Republicans in all the other seats, right? so you can scatter them, you can crack them across all of those other districts, and you can win more seats, sometimes even with fewer votes. If you mathematically arrange the other side's into a handful of places, you essentially, if you essentially distribute the other side's voters as inefficiently as possible, and read yours out as efficiently as possible, you can control delegations, even 50-50 delegations with fewer votes. Sometimes I take Legos, and I'll take 10 red Legos and 10 blue Legos, and you can take the same number of Legos, and I can create three blue or three red districts really, really easily just based on how I stack them up. So the modern story of redistricting also intersects with the modern story of technology and how technology has gotten so much better and stronger. Nobody's using Legos anymore. They are using highly sophisticated computer software. They're uploading massive terabytes of voter information, public and private data sets. uh you know, census data that allows these mapmakers to go up and down streets and essentially create districts uh where the winners for a decade have been predetermined. Republicans realized this first in modern times. So the way I would explain the story is it starts in 2008 with a big Barack Obama victory. Democrats win a super majority in the US Senate. you've got the smartest minds on the Republican and the Democratic side saying, boy, the Democrats have assembled a coalition here that could be the defining majority coalition in American politics for decades to come. And it didn't exactly work out that way, right? oh And one key reason why is because Republicans looking for a path back to power understood that while the 2008 election was historic, the 2010 election could be more consequential. It followed a census year. And there were a handful of really smart Republican strategists who said, well, if we can win control of state legislatures in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Alabama, uh we could have complete power over drawing those district lines with this new technology the following year. They targeted about 115 state legislative races across 17 states. They won this control in all 17 of those states and they remapped the entire country uh really in their advantage. uh So it's not that Democrats don't gerrymander, they certainly still do. It's that Republicans control more states, they have more opportunity to do this, and they control more strategic states because they control still in many cases these purplish swing states. like North Carolina, like Ohio, until recently, Wisconsin, and have been able to do this oh in places where there's lots and lots of seats. That's, see, so just two quick things. Just to make sure that I understand. they basically, if they can get the state, now are you talking about the state legislative, like not federal? Like you're talking about the local Senate. Okay, and so they have the power to redistrict? in most states, it's the state legislatures that have the power to draw lines, usually in conjunction with the governor. And so it is, you know, a map is like any other state law. It is created by the state legislators and by the governor. And so if you can control that, it's like this loophole in our politics. It's moneyball, if you're familiar with the baseball book about the Oakland A's. Excuse me. It's uh trying to find that loophole that no one else is paying attention to that has outsized importance and fully taking advantage of You know, in Texas, they just voted to do their whole map thing. California is in the process. Like, what's the difference between, you know, what they're doing in Texas and then what they're doing in California? You know, both of it really bad. You know, what they're doing in Texas at the behest of President Trump is they are drawing a map that's going to add uh five Republican districts. California in retaliation is looking to suspend its independent commission and they've drawn a map that is going to add five Democratic districts. The Princeton gerrymandering project has looked at this. They say that these two maps are the two best examples, the two worst examples. They are the most manipulated electoral boundaries that this country has seen since the 1970s when you can start measuring this stuff. Really, really anti-voter maps. It was gonna create a 48 to four democratic delegation from California and probably a... Boy, Texas had been 25, 13, so that will go to 30 to eight. So it's going to really do a job on swing districts. If you are a Republican in California or an independent in California, you are not gonna have an awful lot of same if you were in Texas. The backdrop for all this, of course, is that only three seats separate the two parties in Congress right now. ah And so every single seat takes on outsized importance as we head towards a midterm election. ah The midterms tend to favor the party that's out of power. They usually gain somewhere between 12 and 20 seats in Congress. ah And when you only have a three seat edge, that's a uh little scary. So, know, Republicans are looking to effectively add on to that advantage before a single vote has been cast. um I'm curious on two things. uh like what's the metric by which, you know, both Republicans and Democrat, if you know, like, you know, to choose the district. I thought I read or heard somewhere that like for at least the Republicans, it's districts that Trump won at least 60 % of the vote or something like that. My numbers might be off. uh So, so first, yeah, what what's the metric to choose the districts to change and then to like, what are the possible um shortfalls or, you know, what are the things that could go wrong by redistricting? Yeah, you know, um they use all kinds of different voter metrics. And the amazing thing about these software programs is that you can do hundreds and sometimes even thousands of maps and really work and perfect them. But essentially what you're doing is you're building an index off of uh previous elections and how those elections went precinct by precinct. And you might imagine elections that went well for your party, but also build in elections that did not go as well for your party. uh So certainly, you know, if you're a Republican in Texas uh and you're building these maps only off of what happened in 2024, which was a really good year for them and they saw big gains, for example, among Latino voters, uh if you lose those gains, you could have faulty assumptions going into your map, right? That's why they're always testing these against multiple different indices. So you might also use that 2018 and 2020, which were years that were a little bit closer in the state. And you want to build yourself margins that are not so close that a wave tips them the other way. So the sweet spot really is you're trying to draw if you're the Republicans in Texas, a whole bunch of 58 % to 62 % districts. Because if you're going to lose those seats, the kind of wave that would be required would be an eight to 10 point wave. you know, Texas hasn't seen a Democratic plus eight year, I mean, you'd have to go back decades. The best year Democrats have had in the state of Texas in the last, you know, in the 21st century, would be 2018 when it was R plus three. So to imagine a D plus eight, pretty tricky. And those 58 to 62 % seats are probably pretty good. Right now, Republicans in Texas have got a whole bunch of 60 plus and 65 plus seats. So what they can do is they can spread those votes around a little more efficiently by remapping. They can go after those two districts in South Texas. You can take some of those districts, in Houston. And essentially what you're trying to do there is you're cracking those. So if there's a lot of Democratic voters in one place, one option is to draw sort of, you I like to explain it as like a pizza slice. You put the blue city in the center of the pizza. and then you carve up diagonal slices in such a way that there's just a little bit of blue at the tip of all of these districts at the front of the slice, but the actual voters, you know, it's mostly redder central Texas attached onto that. uh And they've been really good at doing that, for example, in Austin in the past or a city like Salt Lake City right now, right, in which uh it's a blue enclave in the middle. of a red state, so you just divide it in quarters. You put a quarter of it into each district, you attach it to redder parts of the state, and you have created a four-row map. And so there's lots of ways that this can be done, right? Democrats in Illinois are doing it differently, right? They're trying to take enough of Chicago. and attach it in spaghetti slices, right, uh down into other parts of the state. uh So there's lots of different ways of doing this depending on which side you are trying to advantage. And it really feels like this should be outlawed. It really feels like this is like completely like not, it's not at all what you think of a fair voting system. So here's what I mean. I go and I vote and I figure my vote's gonna make a difference. Right? I'm going, I'm voting, and I know I'm one amongst millions, but I'm going and I'm sending it in and I figure it makes a difference. Well, when you look at this, you're like, wait, it doesn't make a difference. It just determines where they categorize me if I happen to be a part of a larger conglomeration of equal voters, you know, of like ilk. in my voting and it's really disturbing. so I would love to give you a chance just to say anything else you'd like, because I'd like to, I want to ask a question about mail-in voting, but I wanted to give a chance to kind of, if there's anything else, like from what I said just now about gerrymandering for, if you wanted to respond to that, go ahead before I ask the other question. absolutely right. mean, in 2024, there were 37 districts out of 435 that were within five percentage points. So that's about 8 % of all congressional elections in this country that were actually competitive. All of the rest were essentially predetermined. And they were predetermined by, you know, Wyoming is going to go red and Massachusetts is going to go blue. uh But there's a whole bunch of districts that were predetermined by how those district lines were drawn. Mapmakers and politicians picked who represents those districts, not voters. uh And they decided for a decade before voters even got to the polls. And that is wrong. And when you have non-competitive districts, what it does is it pushes all of the energy, all of the import goes into the primary. and primaries tend to be low turnout, base-driven affairs. Sometimes over the summer, no one even knows the election's taking place. Sometimes because those elections are so important, you might have 10, 11 people running in them, and so the winner might come out with a quarter of the vote. You've got a fraction of a fraction choosing everybody's representative. And when those people go to Washington or to state capitals, they're not looking to serve everybody. They're looking to serve the... they're accountable to the sliver of the primary electorate that put them in office and who can take them out of office. And so when so many of us think that our politicians aren't listening to us or delivering for us or don't care what we think, we're not wrong. They don't like to. I mean, under this system, they are not accountable to us and they are oftentimes insulated from the ballot box. And so, you know, I think what we really need to be looking at is a more proportional system that larger multi-member districts uh that would take the power away from mapmakers and politicians and really put it back in the hands of voters again. I've never voted in a competitive congressional election in my life. I'm 54 years old and I've lived all over the country. I would love to vote in a- in a competitive swing race. ah You know, it doesn't, there's not very many of us lucky enough to. Yeah, yeah, don't want to say that makes sense because it doesn't make sense, but I understand what you're saying. It is what's the reality. So I would love to talk about and ask you about Trump's... He posted in August that he'd issue another executive order or an executive order for nationwide voter ID, paper ballot use, and no mail-in voting. that he essentially would uh speak on that and trying to ban mail-in voting. And I want to kind of concentrate on that. uh What is going on here? Is he actually banning this? Do you think this is going to be able to happen? And what's the logic behind this, do you think? I don't think this is actually going to happen. The president can't do that via executive order. um The constitution gives this power to Congress um and Congress would have to change this. um Well, essentially this power is with each individual state to regulate how its own elections are conducted. And there are numbers. of states, red, blue and purple, that have decided to use mail-in balloting for lots and lots of reasons. It's more convenient, it's cheaper, uh it's very safe. uh It allows some of these far-flung states, uh places like Utah and Oregon or Arizona, where uh much of the population is rural uh and... otherwise hours away from a precinct to be able to vote with ease. So this is fairly common all over the place. uh Congress would have to step in and do a nationwide ban if they wanted to. I don't think they would want to. I imagine lots of Republicans would be opposed to this, and I certainly don't think you could get to a filibuster proof 60. So I don't think that this is, you know, certainly anytime the president talks like this, we have to take it seriously. ah But I don't think that the actual reality is that a mail-in ban is possible. It's not within the power of an executive order. You know when we talk about Millen voting and banning it um The the first thing that came to mind was um Me and my family, we moved to Virginia from Washington state and uh we never once voted in a booth or anything. We just had our, we had our, you know, ballot sent to us and we loved it because we could spend time, talk about it, like hop on the internet, find out who these people are. And we felt we were doing ourselves, you know, a service that way. So if you ban Mel and voting, like who would actually be affected? I think you mentioned a couple of them a second ago, if you live far away from there. precinct or whatever but like who are these people that are mailing in their votes? Yeah, well, you know, there were 13 states and the District of Columbia that mail-in balloting accounted for 30 % or more of all the ballots cast in 2024. And Donald Trump won half of those states. So this is not a partisan question. There are, you know, lots of Democrats, lots of Republicans, lots of independents who take advantage of the opportunity. they use a mail-in ballot. oh Some states have gone entirely vote by mail uh and the states that have done that, oh they often tend to be Western states where the population is so diffuse and so spread out that to set up precincts all over the uh would come at huge expense and also oh a huge delay in collecting and reporting results. So it is been a question of efficiency. You simply get better, fairer, faster results from mail-in balloting than you do if you are sitting with a bunch of paper ballots trying to tabulate them all. It's a little known fact, but the error rate on paper ballots is actually much higher than it is as far as tabulation on a machine count. So, you know, I think, and I think the president might not get this, but I think lots of other Republicans do, which is that, This is a service that lots and lots of voters use and that to put an end to mail-in balloting, require specific forms of ID would in many ways be to suppress their own voters. uh The voters that uh have the most trouble with ID, uh specific forms of ID are uh minority voters and the white working class. uh And as you see the white working class heading towards the Republican party, uh you know, those are the voters that um would be really dramatically affected by this. And um I think that the good news is that this isn't doable by executive order. uh But I think the bad news is that whenever we talk about election fraud or any of these topics without without all the facts behind us, we drive up fear uh and we create apprehensions that are wrong and it calls results into question. you know, I mean, I worry that sometimes that's the goal is to drive up confusion and to sow doubts about results when... there isn't actually any basis for that. Yeah, that's a very concerning uh idea, isn't it? It actually kind of connects with my question that I just have just kind of burning in my mind a little bit. And what I'm wondering is, so if I'm thinking about this um correctly, the people who are studying this, experts in the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, everything, they're aware of these issues that people have to vote. Right. mean, like, like I'm not trying to sound dumb, but I just want to make sure that like with the sophistication of the tools that they have, they're all aware. I guess my point is like when they're pushing these things forward um and someone says, because I often hear like, well, what's wrong with an ID? That's just common sense or, know, like basically um trying to justify. what's happening by saying it's not a big deal, it's just common sense, almost like making it, uh like making the other side feel stupid or ignorant for even wondering about it. And yet we know that if they're creating these barriers for people, they know what that's going to do, correct? I mean, how could they not know? I mean, is that... Is that a good intuition? Do you feel like that's a correct intuition? uh It's simply fact. there is some common sense behind voter ID, right? I have to pull my ID out of my wallet every time I wanna buy a bottle of wine at the grocery store, which these days is pretty often. um But not everybody has an ID, um you know, and sometimes it's that white working class worker who is, you know, following a factory job and hasn't had a passport and is showing up in a new state for work. uh and might have a driver's license, but the driver's license might not be enough to register because you might have to have other papers. But other times, what states have done is that they've put together really specific forms of ID quite intentionally knowing who has and who doesn't have them. uh Texas, for example, back in 2013 when they passed what was at the time one of the most restrictive voter ID bills in the country. When this went to court, it came out that the state of Texas had studied the forms of ID that Latino citizens in the state of Texas were least likely to have. required other ones, right? So they knew which forms people didn't have uh and they were able to. base their list on that. North Carolina, uh not long after that, they passed an ID bill that was modeled after Texas in many ways. And one of the things they did, oh it required a driver's license and other forms of ID. Republicans, they're as they were drawing district lines, especially district lines around college towns, as you know, in North Carolina where there's a lot of those, they created databases in which they matched up public college students and they knew, they compared that to the driver's license databases. And they said, okay, which of these students do not have driver's licenses and won't be able to vote? oh And they drew district lines, you most famously that went right through the heart of oh North Carolina A &T, one of the historic black universities in Greensboro. oh The line that went through the center of that campus was entirely by design, right? The state of Alabama, when they required an ID, what they did after that, they claimed it was budget cuts. but they closed all the driver's license offices in the black belt of Alabama. uh So you simply couldn't go and get the driver's license if you wanted it. uh So I don't have any problem necessarily. If we're going to give everybody an ID or accept reasonable ID, I don't have any problem with showing up and saying who I am. But if we're gonna require specific forms, Knowing that certain people don't have them, um that to me is a pretty serious um issue. Agreed. How do school districts like operate? Because, uh you know, when you are redrawn on these lines, and correct me if I'm wrong, like, it also affects like where your kid goes to school, doesn't it? Well, sure, you know, uh I mean, there are map makers in the state of California, for example, some of these towns that might be white and also Latino in which map makers are able to make a really good living drawing school district lines that keep certain schools white. You know, so that's an art form. uh in some of these states around the country. Absolutely. Once you realize, know, like I said at the top, once you realize the power of districting to draw lines that keep certain people in and certain people out, and you can say, well, that's just where the line is. It's never where the line is. It's where somebody placed the line. And the power to place that line is the power to decide who's on which side of it, who's in, who's out. Hmm, well, what about some states, believe like California, Virginia maybe, had or have or had like a third party commission help draw the lines? what's that all about? And is that kind of a net positive or doesn't really do much? Yeah, that's been really one of the lead reforms that um voters trying to take this power away from politicians and giving it back to people. uh So lots of states have uh passed independent commissions or bipartisan commissions or tried to find various ways to put some guardrails on the system. uh And where you can put guardrails on the system, it tends to... to work better. You get fairer districts, you get more competitive districts, you get voters who are happier with their choices. um The trouble, as we're seeing right now as California is talking about suspending their commission, is that any time you have all 50 states and who are building a national map together, when any one of those states does something bad, there's national consequences. So there becomes no incentive for the states that are doing it right to keep doing it right if Illinois and Florida and Maryland and Texas get to do it any way they want, which I think is one of the reasons why in this case we really need a national standard here if we're going to have fairness. Everybody's got to play by the same rules. Yeah, I mean, that just seems like standard fairness in practice. anyway, maybe that's that's my old fashioned nature coming out, you know? You know, when we're thinking about reform, because we hear a lot about reform and of course, after the post 2020 election with... the amount of controversy that was spread around that election and it being stolen and all that. uh Where do you imagine or think that if there is reform, which seems like there is, but we're gonna disagree on where that comes from, not you and me necessarily, but different people, where should reformers spend their energy? Where should people spend their energy? uh try to bring corrections in your way of viewing it. think we need a national solution to a national problem. uh Now, this isn't to say that if live in Texas, if you live in California, if you live in Missouri right now, as this gerrymander is about to be underway there, uh you should be active and involved and speaking up. uh Oftentimes there's the ability to uh give public testimony or show up at rallies or... uh The like, know, mean, politicians think they can get away with this oftentimes because it usually happens in the dark, because it sounds obscure and weird and wonky, but when they see that people are paying attention, it becomes a little bit harder. I mean, litigation in some of these states could provide a road towards uh fairness. We will see. The courts have become pretty partisan. red and blue alike, that becomes oh complicated. path in some states. But I think where reformers ought to be thinking, you know, is that this is a national problem. It needs a national solution. More and more Americans are aware of this. The 2026 election is going to be fought against a backdrop of partisan gerrymandering nationwide. This is the time for us to be having a real national conversation about what we might do to fix it. It can't get much worse. than this. We're about to have a pretty much a maximally gerrymandered map, right? We're talking about a race to the bottom. It's more like a sprint to the bottom. We're that close. ah So maybe once we reach it, ah there's time for us to all sort of step back and people of good faith can come together and say, hey, ah how can we do this in a way that restores meaning and representation to our elections? uh There are still people that believe the 2020 election were stolen. I uh love for you to uh one kind of opine on whether or not that is true or not uh and help people kind of work through like the idea of the 2020 election was not stolen and how can they find out for themselves? um Well, know, mean, Republicans won an awful lot of elections in 2020. um Were those races stolen too? I mean, um sometimes it feels as if the races we think are stolen are the races we lost, um you know, and— You know, plenty of states that went for Joe Biden in 2020 elected Republicans at lots and lots of different levels. And I guess I would suggest that no one's talking about those races being stolen. But there were something close to five dozen lawsuits that were filed. They were heard by the courts. oftentimes by very conservative courts, and they were rejected by those courts. The 2020 election was free and fair, and when we don't like the results of an election, you know, we used to... call and congratulate the other side and move on and try to think about maybe what our side had done wrong and might do different next time. uh would that we could get back to that kind of honest thinking again. uh The election was super close in some of those states. And. um But it was not that close nationally, right? I mean, seven and a half million votes for Biden over Trump that year. um And, you big turnout. um Very close in Georgia, very close in Arizona, very close in Wisconsin. um But, you know, free and fair. And when we don't like the results of an election, what we have to do is go out and work harder next time. Yeah, absolutely. mean, that sounds reasonable to me, so I'm not really sure why we wouldn't do that, except that certain people want to keep power, right? I mean, once you have it, yeah, go ahead. there's no proof of any voter fraud, you know? I mean, this to me is the thing that we have to come back to, right? If someone's going to talk about voter fraud, I'd like to see the actual evidence. And they're never able to produce it. So voter fraud has become sort of this boogeyman that justifies all of these laws uh that actually do make it harder for people to vote, but that aren't based in any reality. oh The Heritage Foundation keeps a database of voter fraud, and the Heritage Foundation's about as right as, you know, I think tanks. and there's a guy named Hans von Bukowski that has got this, it's his baby. And there's about 1500, 1600 examples dating back to the early 1980s. lots of those examples are just mistakes and filling out absentee ballots. But this is the leading person calling for these laws. This is the leading foundation. and they're only able to come up with fifteen or sixteen hundred examples out of the hundreds of billions of votes that have been cast over that time. We're not talking about anything that is really a serious issue. know, Dinesh D'Souza has been forced to back away from... much of what's in his movie, right? The Fox News and Newsmax lawsuits against Dominion ended in billion dollar, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars of payouts. uh All of those lawsuits that were filed in 2020 were rejected by courts and judges across the political spectrum. uh I think... I think if we're going to keep talking about fraud, there ought to be some onus on those who bring it up to put up or shut up. Yeah, I understand that sentiment completely. You know, what do you imagine, we've been talking about this whole time, uh what's going on with the elections, the voting, what should be next, um what's happened. My question is, moving forward, um What do you imagine are the biggest threats right now? I know we've kind of again probably mentioned them overlap, but where is this going? Do you think if it's maximally gerrymandered, what's next? What do you imagine? Yeah, know, a maximally gerrymandered map is, you know, when only 8 % of congressional elections are competitive and now we're about to knock competitive races in Texas and Ohio and California off the board and who knows where else, we might be looking at, you know, 20 that are actually competitive out of 435. That to me is pretty frightful. And... the U.S. Supreme Court looking at another case in October that could narrow the Voting Rights Act further, that could do away with majority minority seats across the South. I think we're not talking enough about the state of the Voting Rights Act in some states where it's very much still necessary, but has been really put through the shredder by this court. uh You know, I worry that all of these executive orders are in fact designed to sort of sow doubt about the 2026 elections and the fairness of it um without, again, having any actual proof about it, but just to sort of create the sense that if the other side wins, that there has somehow been... have been cheating or follow play when that actually won't be able to be proven. I worry about troops. I worry about deployment of National Guard to democratic cities on election day, especially if you are— I mean, imagine if you are able to end mail-in voting and then what you have on election day are six, seven, eight hour lines uh in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, uh and then you send the National Guard out and then you have masked ICE agents on the street on election day, just intimidating voters. um That would have sounded like something out of an... apocalyptic movie uh just a few years ago, right? But as I say it now, it's sort of imaginable. I don't think we're describing the crazy, I don't think you have to have um Trump derangement syndrome or something to be looking at this and saying, boy, um We're on some dangerous paths here. I hope that calmer heads can prevail and we can step aside from them. Yeah, I do too. Man, David, thank you so much for being on the program with us today. I mean, it has been truly enlightening and I just appreciate your insight. I appreciate, yeah, ah your view on it and your understanding of the material. Thank you so much for sharing your heart and mind with us. Really a pleasure, I am a fan, so it's an honor to be on with you all. So thank you so much for the ability to have this conversation. absolutely war fans of you and we're fans of voting and we want voting to be fair here at Faithful Politics. I'll say it from the conservative side, dude I'm a Republican, I'm gonna vote Republican except for maybe the presidential election. That's normally what I do. But we are a fan of voting here at Faithful Politics and we appreciate your work. David and trying to spread light and help people understand and do work to actually, let's get back to something common sense here in America. And um that's what we want. That's what we all want. Well, again, thank you so much. And to our viewers, guys, thanks for joining us. We're going to put all sorts of, you know what? I should ask this, though, before I do this. David, how can people get involved? And how can they connect with you? I should have asked that first. is fairvote.org. ah I am on Twitter. I'm DaveDaily3. I'm DaveDaily on the blue sky. You can find the books. Wherever you find books, your local bookstore is a pretty great place to go. But there's all kinds of places online uh if uh your local bookstore doesn't have it or isn't convenient. um just be really careful asking for the first book by name. I love it and we'll put that in the description so everyone can see it and then they can try to go buy it and ask for it by name. David again, thank you. Appreciate you and to our viewers guys, like, subscribe, do the stuff that hacks the algorithm. We love you, we appreciate you, we wanna keep getting this stuff out to you so keep your conversations not right or left but up and we'll see you next time.