Episode Transcript: Kevin Johnson
Cold Open
So in other words, representation, you shouldn't expect to have a judge who represents you.
Mara
Yes.
Kevin
You should expect to have a law writer who represents you, but not a judge. You shouldn't expect to have an election official who represents you. You should have an election official who treats all votes the same, gives everyone the chance to register, and makes sure that everything is correct, accurate, secure throughout the process.
Introduction
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to What Voting Means To Me after a much needed short vacation hiatus. I am your host, Mara Suttmann-Lea. I am really happy to be back, and I'm super excited to share the episodes that we have coming up in the pipeline. A reminder that anyone who wants to participate in the What Voting Means To Me project has multiple options for doing so, please go to www.whatvotingmeanspod.com/participate to learn more. I'm going to keep today's introduction pretty short because I want to be able to devote as much time as possible to the conversation I had with Kevin Johnson, co-founder and director of the Election Reformers Network.
Election Reformers Network or ERN is an organization that advances innovations that protect elections from polarization. In this episode, I talk to Kevin about the work that he and his colleagues are doing to support impartial election administration, independent redistricting, and voting rules.
So if any or all of that interests you, please listen on.
But of course, I also hope that you're tuning in really because you want to hear about what voting means to Kevin.
And I think that this episode is especially poignant, given the theme that I have chosen for the podcast this year of community. So for Kevin, voting is not just an individual act that reflects self-interest. It has, whether we see it this way or not, greater meaning and impact on our communities and the people that we love and the people that we care about. Voting to me,
Kevin tells us, means the right to be a part of community. Your ballot becomes meaningful because it combines with other voices.
So there's this tradition in political science research to think about the act of voting and the decision to vote as one that is more or less a calculus of pure self-interest and costs and benefits. And of course, that is an important piece of the puzzle.
But I wonder what democracy might look like if more people thought about the act of voting and the choices they made, not only as mattering for them, but mattering for their beloved communities or a beloved community.
On that note, please enjoy Kevin Johnson.
Episode
Kevin
Hi, how are you?
Mara
Hi, Kevin. I am doing so well. It's so good to see you. How are you doing?
Kevin
I'm doing great.
Mara
Thank you so much for being here and welcome to What Voting Means to Me. And we're just going to go ahead and jump right into it with that first question that I like to ask all of my subjects, my interviewees, which is what is your first memory of living in a democracy?
Kevin
Well, thank you, Mara. And it's great to be here. As I mentioned, I've loved listening to your prior episodes, love this question, love the way your conversations have evolved. But I'm going to cheat, sorry.
Mara
That's okay.
Kevin
I'm going to give you two answers. Two answers, okay? So the first is actually really my first personal experience related to voting. And it's from kindergarten. And I have this memory of…the sort of town elders or something in my hometown, coming to Kingman Garden with the old fashioned voting booth, you know, with the curtain that closed and all of those things. And I think it was like a holiday, like maybe Father's Day or something, because I remember my father being there and we got to practice voting and it felt really cool. And I felt part of the community. Like I felt like this was that the connecting point to sort of the important stuff, you know? And so it just had this really sort of resonant experience from that point of view.
And I think the first time I actually voted, I think I was like, I was a student, I had a mail ballot, I like sat on a bench by myself and like dejectedly voted for Walter Mondale, who I knew had no chance in whatever year that was, 84. Yeah, 84, 84. Sometimes I have a hard time like, keeping all of those in order.
And we're all a little reluctant to date ourselves quite to that point, but there it is. It's out there now. But I still feel like, you know, there is sort of this access to community thing or sort of, and almost this sort of, it's more than just access, it's you deserve to be in this community. We all deserve to be in this community. That's kind of this wonderful feeling. And I think some of the memory of my dad being there too gives it that particular, I don't know, generational something to it. But so anyway, that's the first of my answers to your question.
Okay. The second is really very different because it's not about an experience personally of my first time voting, but instead it's about sort of the concept of people voting for the first time and actually nations voting for the first time. So I had this sort of extraordinary experience in the 90s of working overseas in new democracies that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were doing kind of institution building and that kind of thing.
And sort of at that time, there was this incredible sort of flowering of countries that hadn't previously had a situation where elections happened, where democracy happened, and they kind of made this transition. And my entry point into that was that I'd actually been a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. When I got there in 1888, at a time when there were zero democracies on the continent of Africa, unless you've been South Africa, but of course only for whites.
And the official view of the State Department was, you know, Africans don't need democracy. You know, it's too divisive. So they really like bought the line that came from these tin pot dictators in all of these countries. And so there was sort of just this complete absence, you know, of like you would people, people wouldn't question anything.
Mara
Wow.
Kevin
There were new political parties emerging, there were independent newspapers, there were countries where the sort of citizens kind of took hold and created these sovereign national conferences, these conferences that declared themselves sovereign and gave themselves the power to write a new constitution and set up elections to begin the transition to new regime. A lot of those got sabotaged by the dictator or one thing or the other, but a good handful of them proceeded in a way that really helped free people who had not previously been free.
And so in a couple of different countries, I got to be part of the observer delegations who were there, and actually for a long time in advance, to kind of watch all of this development and to see a country vote for the first time.
Mara
Wow.
Kevin
And it's just, it's an incredible experience. And it's really about sort of this sense of sort of deserving and validation, you know, that you can see in the faces of the people as they carried their voter card, and in many cases waiting in line for hours and hours and hours.
And we did a lot of work in South Africa, which of course is sort of the...the poster child for this but also in many other countries and as you saw the people in these lines sort of the conveyance of dignity. I belong, I don't, I'm not going to be, my seat at this table isn't something I have to win or be judged. I just get it. As a sense, I'm at this table. I'm part of this process, part of this community. And so that was a really beautiful thing.
And the work we did was about sort of doing the monitoring to make those elections safe. And it was also about helping these countries, and this was in Central Asian Europe as well as in Africa, and also did work in the Middle East, and it's about helping these countries with the architecture of the institutions that was going to establish their democracy going forward. And that meant like the huge constitutional questions were on the table, like what kind of system would that be? What kind of election administration should they have, and should it be proportional representation? And so it was a fascinating experience of sort of learning about those things and seeing how different countries kind of dealt with all that.
And I came away from that experience with sort of two core, very, very strong impressions about America's democracy. And one was we are still this beacon that drives people toward freedom. And I heard it time and time again when I was in different countries. And how the Americans relate to what we symbolize. That's the first impression. The second impression is they are not interested at all in the systems that we use because they have learned how many other countries have sort of bypassed us in a sense in designing the architecture of how to make a democracy, you know, the nuts and bolts work as effectively as possible.
Those two things, admiration for what we have but wanting to help its architecture get better.
Mara
Sure.
Kevin
It led me to create election reformers network, which we'll talk about more as we go on.
Mara
Mm. I think that I would like to hear a little bit more about what your, if you have recall, about what your, how it felt, like maybe physically, literally how it felt to watch people self-govern for the first time. Because you're describing an experience that we as folks who grew up in the United States, really, especially folks like us, we read about it. We didn't experience it. Now if you are a Black American in the 1960s, yes, you have that more direct experience, but it's so removed, I think, for so many of us. And I would just love to hear a little bit more about what that moment was like for you and anything else that you observe. You use the words worthy, dignity, and the idea that we are worthy of having a dignified voting experience is sort of what stood out in my head. And I am just so intrigued and moved by what you described that I just, I want to hear more about it.
Kevin
Yeah. So it's a great question and the self-governing is of course always really about being represented. Right? So we're, you know...the way that Greeks would get all whatever 6,000 and they would vote. And so there was the sort of direct self-governing there in a sense, but no one's trying to do anything like that. They are, you were voting to be represented.
Mara
Yes.
Kevin
And that, that's that element of self-governing, the claim that's created and the tie that's created through representation when that tie is real and sanctified if I can use that maybe.
Mara
Absolutely, yeah.
Kevin
Or heavy word, you know, by a vote, is that's a powerful thing and we have this I want to tell you about one of several experiences but the one that I think addresses your question most was actually in the West Bank and Gaza I ran our programs there in the in the mid 90s where actually a lot of progress was happening in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, you know fit and start negotiations and those negotiations have their own leader and their own parliament through voting in West Bank and Gaza, East Jerusalem. And we were there for the observation with President Carter and all of that, which was just incredible.
And, you know, just again, a lot of that emotion of that sort of sense of…achieving some degree of dignity. But we stayed on because we had a follow-on assignment to help the new parliament put its sort of structure in place. And so that was sort of the institution-building piece. And we had a couple of experts in parliamentary procedures and sort of different structures that were kind of guiding that. But the first step of it was to talk actually to all of the winners, all of the elected members of parliament about kind of what they were expecting and kind of what it meant. And so this is what it means to be represented from the other side, from the side of the representatives. And many of these were sort of well-known leaders in either the community that had stayed in the West Bank and Gaza over all the years or the community that was in exile in Tunisia and whatever. Not to get into PLO history, whatever.
To hear them talk about what they felt knowing they now had a constituency that voted for them and could put them right back at and just that that the responsibility but also the product you know when this is coming up I mean that nothing…I mean they're being and that one point that you know how soon some municipalities have elected mayors you know but nothing at the scale of like a national election.
And so this was just a whole different level. And almost every one of them, you would sort of talk to them about what their aspirations were. And right up front, they would talk about the peace negotiations and what they wanted out of that. Okay, that's kind of to be expected. But an immediate number two was, but regardless of how that goes, we're going to build democratic institutions in the land that we're able to get through that negotiation and they're going to be real. So there was this incredible kind of connection and the way in which creating strong democratic institutions itself was such a value to them that was really inspirational.
Mara
Wow. And you just highlighted something that I think in...the world of political science research, but also just perhaps the way that we think about democratic representation more broadly, that isn't... I actually don't think about it that much. What do the elected representatives feel? How do they view representation? And we talk about this theoretically, you know, do they see themselves as delegates, do they see themselves as trustees? But that...
is so incredible that you've had not only the experience of observing folks casting ballots to be represented, but then engaging with the folks who get elected and coming out with such a clear vision from them. You know, the immediate interest in the peace negotiations, but also the idea that democratic institutions are something that are just valued there from the get-go.
That must have been incredible to witness. I think it would be really fascinating for folks to hear about. You've shared your earlier years, you know, working as an election observer and helping folks in these transitioning democracies. And I'm also just very curious about how you made your way to the Election Reformers Network and anything and everything that you want to share about the work that you guys do.
Kevin
I guess I would say as a starter, and this is kind of going in a sense to the big question of this podcast, what elections mean and what elections mean to me. And I would say that, as I said, based on that sort of childhood memory, part of what I feel like elections mean is sort of the right to be in community, you know, that there is sort of this way in which you work together and it's elections are interesting because our democracy is interesting because it's actually not really based on individuals. We think of it as a very individualistic thing but it's the institutions that make it work are political parties and legislative bodies and you know election ministry. Participation is also innovation. This was really why ERN got founded. There's a little bit of this sort of myth that we have in the U.S. that the system we've been given is kind of like a perfect grandfather clock, you know, that the country inherited from the founders and we used to just sit back and admire it, you know, and everything sort of like the old DSU, you know, whatever that the role of the gods or something.
Mara
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin
But, you know, democracy is always under threat. And it's under threat in a sense from money and oligarchy. Like you can look at these countries that had democracies that where more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people have more and more money ended up making the democracy effectively a farce. And so money will always find its way through and so you need to update the rule to keep democracy continuing to kind of live up to its to its promise.
And so that's why I mean there's been a lot of talk about sort of how democracies die. I'm really interested in how democracies innovate. And here, the US is sort of interestingly behind. We have not kept pace with structures that make the system work better. And so ERN kind of got started with that broad goal of what are the innovations we can help advance here. And so that led us to do some work, for example, in things like ranked choice voting.
We have narrowed that because it's got to be strategic and focused.
Mara
Sure.
Kevin
And we have narrowed that to the innovations that are really about preventing conflict of interest and the insiders from setting the rules of competition. What does that mean? So think about redistricting, which in most states is led by the members of the legislature. They get to control the lines that decide who gets the vote. So you're sort of, it's very, there's a huge conflict of interest there.
Mara
Sure.
Kevin
And of course they also do it, you know, they can, there's a lot of incumbent protection. So redistricting is one of the areas where an innovation has happened so that it’s now ubiquitous across the democratic world except here. And that innovation of course is taking the line drawing away from the insiders and giving it to an independent commission.
Mara
Yes.
Kevin
And that's now started in the U S and it started in a really interesting, innovative sort of American specific kind of way with these citizens commissions that have these great applicants, you know, people apply. And then there are thousands, 20,000 applicants I think came into, to be involved in Michigan. It's amazing. I mean, it's stuff that you're like, we're not going to want do this. And I've talked to some of the folks who served on these bodies and they were like, we were so much more than the sum of our parts. Yeah. You know, and cause the way it works, many of your listeners will know, but the way it works for those who don't is that, these commissions at which are now in California, Arizona, Michigan and Colorado, with more to come. they work by happy have for example five republicans five democrats and five independence and then they brought maps and you have to get a vote where uh... there's been approval from each of those groups those uh... those individuals are not nominated by the party that's just a party affiliation and general required not to have any connection…
they may be affiliated with the party, but they're not political insiders. That's the key. That's the great thing.
Mara
Yes. But the feeling is that I've heard from talking to folks there is that they're not there as delegates of that party. They're not speaking for that party. They're citizens working together to solve a problem. And it's kind of like the jury, you know, what an amazing innovation. The jury, you get 12 people, a better judgment comes. This is like, the jury is this bit of human technology. How can we judge the culpability of one of our own numbers?
Yeah. So commissions have done that. And so that's one area where we do work. We're helping more states have independent redistricting, and we're also helping courts do a better job at policing partisan gerrymandering in the states that don't have independent commissions. So that's one of our areas of work. And then another area of work is sort of parallel to that, which is getting partisans away from having too much control of election administration.
All are senior members of a party at the same time as they are the top person in their state for elections. There's all, many of them do a tremendous job.
Mara
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Kevin
A really significant risk. Some have not done a tremendous job. Some have. There've been some problems with some because of that partisan affiliation. And also election boards are really made up of nominees of the parties. Whereas we could use the same technology that's in use in independent redistricting commissions of a more broadly representative commission structure as a new way of putting in place governance in state level election administration. So that's another area that we're working with. So those are, I'll stop there.
Mara
I could sit and listen for a very long time because these are the kinds of reforms that I actually don't get to talk about, especially the redistricting reforms a lot, about a lot with my podcast guests, because they do have a lot of election administrators and folks who are talking about provisional voting and ballot, like I was just talking about ballot design with someone recently. And it's so, seeing the changes that have happened in redistricting, especially my, I'm from Michigan, so I was very pleased. I currently live in Connecticut, but I was very pleased to see the outcome of that.
And it really...gives me a lot of optimism to hear these things. And I do think about the partisanship and election administration and these are the kinds of questions that my students grapple with. And it's the sort of the through line that I'm hearing and let me know how this resonates with you when it comes to that question of partisanship and election administration and electing partisans rather or nominating partisans. It's interesting that we live in a country where our democratic system allows us to represent people that pass policies that reflect our interests. And at the same time, it sounds like what you're saying is that we need to move away from the idea that it is the folks who are elected that are also in charge of election policy. It's like we want it to be democratic. This is a democratic system. But the system by which we democratically elect our representatives needs, we need to think about representation differently. I don't know if that makes sense, but I was just sort of like trying to wrap my head around this question of like, how do we think about representation when it comes to election policy, both in terms of passage and implementation? And if there's any thoughts you have on that meandering line of thinking, I would love to hear them.
Kevin
Those are really, that's a really well-framed question. And I think, I mean, one angle that I think...to bring to it is sort of the comparison to judges inherently corrupting of state courts.
People have kind of come to the same view, you know, and there are some state judicial positions that are elected in partisan elections and there were literally the judges I'm running as Republican and, and then some that are nonpartisan. And that ends up ends up not really making a difference. You know, there was Supreme Court justice, state Supreme Court justice election in Wisconsin where there was allegedly nonpartisan, there's no, no name on the ballot. But you know, I think the Democratic Party gave $10 million to the winner and the Republican Party probably gave seven million dollars to them. And the winner sort of said she would recuse if the Democratic Party was a party in a case before her, but there'd be all sorts of decisions that are going to impact the interests of the party for which they're not actually the plaintiff for that.
You know, again, there is sort of a technology and innovation that has helped. And back in the 40s…uh... machine politics in states like Missouri led to the creation of it something called the judicial nominee commission model body that's you know some members picked by the governor some members picked by the state bar association that nominates that that does all of the reviewing for open seats on different benches print court below interviews does all that stuff in public ever with uh... and transparently and then will offer three nominees for an open judge position and the governor has to pick from those three. Most analyses of that system are pretty positive about both that it's accountable and that it's not corruptible. So you get judges who have actually served well but aren't influenced, their decisions are not as influenced on the bench as happens when, you know, I mean, judges who run for election.
The studies are like a large percentage of the money contributed comes from corporations and people who have cases expected to go before that judge. Yes. You know, the corrupting element. So that's kind of an extreme thing for which the collection piece I think is analogous, but not as bad. You know, there is...So in other words, representation, you shouldn't expect to have a judge who represents you. Yes. You should expect to have a law writer who represents you, but not a judge. You shouldn't expect to have an election official who represents you. You should have an election official who treats all votes the same, gives everyone the chance to register, and makes sure that everything is correct, accurate, secure throughout the process.
You should have a, you know, representatives that help set election policy at the high level. But the further down election policy making goes toward the real details, the more it needs to be in the hands of, you know, technical professionals. I'll give you another example.
Mara
Oh, please, please. Yes.
Kevin
I looked a lot at Canada, which has horrible corruption scandal in an election in 1917, I think it was, you know, ballot box stuffing and all the worst. And we had tons of that too, of course, um, in the U S. Um, and it led the federal parliament to sort of say, we got to clean this up. And the parties agreed. Okay, we got to clean this up. And they created elections system in Canada, and they created the federal chief electoral officer. And I've talked to the people who've had that position and they, um, they don't have to ask for a budget from Parliament. They spend what they need and they account for it after the fact.
Mara
Wow.
Kevin
That's independence. At the provincial level, the provinces each have the same. The job of a provincial chief election officer, who is sort of a counterpart to our secretaries of state, I'm speaking to the provincial chief election officer of Ontario. Ontario passed a law establishing voter ID not so long ago. He decides what IDs are acceptable. Oh, okay. Out of the political purview where it is this incredible fight, left, right turnout, increased.
If you want a safe highway, you hire the best engineer you can. And that engineer decides like how much steel should be in the bridge. And if the bridge falls down, you fire him and you might even throw him in jail for if he, you know, was corrupt or whatever. Yeah. You don't have legislators say this is how you build a bridge. And I think likewise, I thought this we're a long, long way from this, right? We're going to in the opposite direction.. Wisconsin is trying to put its legislature in charge of election administration, which is ought to run afoul with separation of powers.
So in the other piece about Canada that's interesting is we found that there's clear indication the parties are able to see this as their interest, as in their interest to move these things out of their domain. So there were a couple of emergencies in different Canadian provinces, and you can see where there was a law passed to give the chief election officer of a certain province control on the case of floods. And then 10 years later, let's give him control and decision making in any emergency, why not? He's the person that we rely on. Yeah. You know, so this notion that the more...time passed, the more there was this understanding of the political value and the true neutrality of these people who were designated to be independent and the benefit of the parties to get out of fighting over those things.
The vision that we have at ERN is parties should win on their ideas and their leaders, not their control of the rules. And no major democracy in the world has more party control of the rules than the United States.
I think it's a critical reason why our polarization is so bad.
Mara
Yeah. I think that now is a great time to transition back to that big question, which you've touched on, I think, implicitly throughout and sort of hinted at how you might think about that question. But I'll ask it of you anyway, again. What does voting mean to you?
Kevin
Voting to me means the right to be a part of community, the right to be a part of shaping, coming together with others, not just on your own, it's not just your ballot. Your ballot becomes meaningful because it combines with your ballot, right? Coming together with others to help shape life.
Mara
Yes.
Kevin
And the community piece I think is important because...I think we're a little bit too going down the road of starting to say that the job of democracy is to give everyone what they need. Democracy is never going to give everyone what they need. It's just, in fact, we really need democracy to be a little bit more explicit about cost and benefit and trade-off and we got to make choices and that kind of thing. But at least it gives you the opportunity in community with others to try to shape your future. So it's not so self-centered. It's more community-centered.
The other part of what democracy means is innovation. In some ways it's the most complicated technology of all. It's not cell phones that are complicated technology. It's human institutions. How can you design systems that allow people to make decisions, make judgments, decide what's right and wrong for each other, by each other, in a way that everyone will recognize or the vast majority will recognize as fair? Yes. Really, really hard thing to do, particularly at scale, but something we absolutely have to do and have that kind of moral anchor.
But we have to keep improving it because these systems can and need to be made better.
Mara
Yes, yes. And the foundation or infrastructure that we were given handed down from the illustrious founders as it were, it is a pretty remarkable system. It is. And also it's not one that we should just navel gaze at and not actively try to improve.
Kevin
Absolutely. I totally agree. Yeah. I think, I mean, and the thing that everyone in your profession talks about wisely, I think, about the founders is that they were really wrong about political parties. You know, they could keep the parties out of the process.
And as a result, the parties swamped the process. Yes. You know, we sort of have a lot of constitutional writers who came later acknowledge that parties are inevitable and sort of hived off what role they should have and what role they shouldn't have. Yeah. And in a way, you have to admire the founders, because what they were hoping is that the notion of civic virtue would be strong enough that we'd have leaders who do the right thing. And then in a way we always it's great that we have that kernel in our in our creation story. Yes. You know, because we always should draw on it. And, you know, the motto of, you know, country for before party is something that we should still be saying.
And states every day put country before party, put their state before party. It happens, but it doesn't always happen. We need the guard rails for when they don't.
Mara
Yeah, community and innovation, thinking about those ideas. Yeah, that's so clear. I have to say there's a quote by John Lewis that I more or less have memorized that I've been thinking about this entire episode since the first time you mentioned the word community. Democracy is not a state, it is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we call the beloved community, a nation and world society at peace with itself. And it just seems like that is the idea and sentiment that undergirds your own democracy story and all of the work that you do.
Kevin
I love that phrase and the beloved community. The beloved community, yeah. It's at peace with itself. Yeah.
Mara
And that it is it is not a state, it is an act, you know, that it is not something it is something that requires consistent attention, especially now. And my goodness, we didn't even get to get into I oftentimes will ask us, you know, what's most concerning for you? What are you most optimistic about? By way of closing, is there any thing you’d like to offer? I mean, we've talked so much about, I think, a lot of challenges that American democracy is facing. Is there anything in particular that gives you optimism in this moment in history?
Kevin
I'm actually quite optimistic. I think that we are making a lot of progress. If you think about over the last sort of 15, 20 years...we have gone from a voting system significantly impaired by the fact that elections on a Tuesday and it's not a holiday to a system where a very large percentage of voters now have an opportunity to vote differently than on the Tuesday that's not a holiday.. Huge infrastructure challenge dealt with, done, of course, all sorts of controversy, whatever, scandals, and a scandal, not the right word, but debate about it, but it's happened and it's working and it's allowing, making it easier to vote. So huge success.
Something we would have been stuck with for 200 years, voting on a Tuesday. Now that's changed. Yes. We have also been stuck with partisan redistricting for 200 plus years. We now have, we will soon have six states with these independent commissions and we have a good number of states that effectively police partisan gerrymandering through their courts. So that's like a major win.
We are starting to explore these different ways of voting again. You know, the French was voting in some of these, and we didn't even get to any of those things. I think there's real innovation going on there. So I think the reform energy is tremendous, and a lot of these reforms are not actually zero-sum game reforms where it's just one party that's going to benefit. They actually are in the best interest of both parties. You know, redistricting, for example, where you mostly have safe districts, ends up making it harder for the parties to govern because they empower the extremes that make life miserable. It's has to be miserable for members of Congress.
Mara
Oh, I'm sure.
Kevin
Clearly empowered extremes, redistricting, and right now, both parties kind of are just, are basically a parody in how much they benefited from the last round of redistricting, so maybe it's time to make a deal.
Mara
Well, Kevin, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time. I do have to scoot to another meeting.
Kevin
All right, thank you so much.
Mara
Oh my god, this has been such a delight. Oh, I'm so excited to edit this episode. I'll be in touch and we'll let you know before everything goes out, okay? Great. Okay, take care. Bye-bye.