(upbeat instrumental music) - My guest is Ray Kennedy.

He is with the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- So please share what the Citizens Redistricting Commission is and what you're charged to do.

- The Citizens Redistricting Commission is the body that was established by Citizen Initiative back in 2008 to take over the process of drawing new lines for political districts here in California.

It is important to note that we're responsible for US House of Representatives Districts, state Senate Districts, State Assembly Districts, and State Board of Equalization Districts.

We are not going to be involved in County Board of Supervisor districts, city council districts, community college board districts, school board districts, any of those others.

We hope to collaborate, cooperate with those efforts, but those lines are the responsibility of other bodies.

- How did redistricting work prior to 2010?

- Before 2010, it was the legislators who were responsible for drawing lines basically of their own districts.

And a lot of this was behind closed doors.

So people had no idea what sort of horse trading might've gone on behind closed doors.

The rules that we operate under, both the California State Constitution as well as various sections of the government code stipulate that we have to do all of this out in the open.

Very limited exceptions, people who are familiar with the Brown Act or the Bagley-Keene Act will be familiar with those very limited exceptions.

But by and large, all of our work has to be done in the open.

People can tune in, listen to our meetings, watch our meetings on Zoom.

They can call in with input several times a day.

So it's a very transparent process now.

- And this was because the people voted...

The people of California voted to have it this way, which is why it is this way now, right?

- Right.

There were actually two citizen initiatives.

The first one in 2008, set up the commission but gave it responsibility only for state Senate, state assembly, and state Board of the Equalization.

It passed pretty easily.

I mean, I was here, I remember that it passed pretty easily.

And then there was a further initiative two years later to add the responsibility for US House of Representatives seats.

So that's how it came to be.

- So what I'd like to do now is go through kind of the criteria that you have to work with and your fellow commissioners have to work with within drawing the maps.

What are some of those criteria that you'll be dealing with?

- Well, the first one is the US Constitution and various Supreme Court rulings have basically set the rules that we have to ensure that districts are very close to exactly equal in population.

Maybe not down to one person but certainly any difference is going to be looked at and people are going to be asking us, "Why are these districts different?"

Second of all, Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 establishes that minority groups should have a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

And we will have VRA Counsel working with us to help us understand the case law that will apply to this, ways that States have sought to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act in the past.

So that we can very carefully consider these requirements and ensure that our work meets the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

Third is probably one of the simplest and that is contiguity.

We have to ensure that you can get from one part of the district to any other part of the district at least as the crow flies or as a bird would fly, not necessarily going by highways, but all parts of the district have to be connected to each other.

We can't have Islands...

Unless we're talking about actual Islands off the coast in which case we'll attach those to a nearby landmass, but we can't have pockets of districts that aren't connected to other parts of the district.

Next is probably the heart of the map.

And that is communities.

The California State Constitution says that we have to minimize the division of cities, counties, neighborhoods, and communities of interest to the extent possible.

Now, we can't violate any of the higher ranked criteria in order to keep those together.

But that is really kind of the heart of the matter.

And of course we have easy access to maps of the counties, maps of the cities, but what we need citizens to provide input on is where are their neighborhoods?

And more importantly what are their communities of interest?

A community of interest is a kind of a concentrated body of people with similar interests.

But we know that people have all sorts of interests and it is possible for people to belong to multiple communities of interest.

Communities of interest can be cultural, it can be economic, they can be who has access to what media during an election.

And one of the things that we've been reminded on is that communities of interest are contextual.

Meaning my community of interest for the State Assembly may be different from my community of interest for US House of Representatives.

There was an interesting example back in 2011, when I attended the 2010 commissions hearing in Palm Springs, there was a lot of discussion of what to do about the Salton Sea and whether the Salton Sea area should be represented by one member of the House of Representatives or two.

Two would mean that there would be two votes in Congress for things affecting the Salton Sea area.

Whereas if you drew the lines differently and only one person represented that whole area there'd be one vote in the House of Representatives.

There may have been other issues behind that presentation or that way of casting the issue.

But it was something to be looked at in that process.

- I know there's more criterias but it just seems like this is a huge, huge challenge to what you're being asked to do.

How are you chosen to sit on this commission?

Give me a little bit of your background.

- Basically, I had been working in the field of International Electoral Assistance for roughly 30 years.

I observed my first election in Brazil in 1989.

I joined a non-profit organization called the International Foundation for Electoral Systems full time a year later, worked for them for 10 years and then started working for the UN for the next 20 years, roughly.

So I've been doing elections work all over the world.

I was involved in a redistricting process in Liberia in 2005.

So it's familiar to me.

And then the State Constitution sets up a very rigorous application, review, and selection process.

So there was an initial application that was submitted in 2019.

Those were reviewed, a lot of people who...

There were 20,000 some of those.

Then there was an initial review, some 2,000 and some people were invited or actually submitted secondary applications, which included essay questions and additional background information.

The applicant review panels that was established by the State Auditor's Office, then went through all 2,000 plus of those applications and progressively narrowed it down until they had a pool of 120 applicants, 40 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and 40 others that they wanted to interview.

They selected those 120 to give some balance geographically, ethnically, socioeconomically, et cetera.

They interviewed those 120 candidates, narrowed that field down to 60.

Presented that slate of 60 to the legislature.

The legislative leadership had the opportunity and took the opportunity to strike 24 of the 60.

So there is a pool of 36 that went into a random draw or actually three random draw to select the first eight commissioners, three Democrats, three Republicans, and two others.

So I was one of the three Democrats.

The eight of us then started meeting in July of last year to review the applications of the remaining candidates in the three pools.

And eventually agreed on a slate of six others two Democrats, two Republicans, and two others.

And so now we're 14 of us.

- Wow.

What an extensive process.

I can't believe it was that deep.

I was reading about it and I didn't realize it was quite that deep, but I am glad to hear that is balanced in that we have the same amount of Republicans and Democrats, and others.

So that could be an independent or whatever they may call themselves or vote as, okay.

Why was it important for you to serve on this commission?

What do you hope to accomplish?

- After 30 years of helping people around the world have a voice in their own communities affairs, it felt like the right thing to do to work to ensure that people in my own community had that same opportunity.

I had also learned seven years after I started doing elections work that 90 some years ago my grandfather was a member of the County Board of Elections in North Carolina, where he lived.

So it's also in my blood, it's something that I've really enjoyed.

And this was an opportunity to do the work that I love closer to home.

- Now, this is how it's working in the State of California, the people voted and wanted it this way.

Does it work this way in all the States or does it work maybe the way it did prior in some of the other States?

Do you know how some of the other States work?

- Most of the States still do it through the legislature.

There does seem to be more and more support nationwide for this sort of commission.

California was actually not the first state to go with a citizens redistricting commission.

Arizona was.

Arizona has a five member commission.

And there are some States that either have adopted that five member model or seem to be moving towards that model of a five member redistricting commission.

Michigan is one of the latest to establish a Citizens Redistricting Commission.

They are more similar to us.

They have a larger membership.

There may be half a dozen States or so that have this sort of commission.

Virginia recently established a mixed commission, which is I believe eight legislators and eight citizens.

So kind of partway there towards a truly citizens redistricting commission.

- So there are obviously-- - In some States... - Yeah.

So there's obviously various ways throughout the different States.

I wanna ask you, how are you gathering input from the public?

How can the community get involved so that their voices are heard.

You have such a huge area that you're covering.

So how can the community share their thoughts and what kinda timeline are you working on?

- The timeline has been one of the biggest headaches for us because of course the Census was delayed last year.

The Census results are delayed.

Under normal circumstances, we would have had the actual Census redistricting results in our hands by the 1st of April.

Then the Census announced that it would be more like the end of July, and then they said the end of September and now they've said, "Well, we might be able "to get something to you in the second half of August."

So it it's been very much a moving target.

As far as input from people of California, we've been very clear that we want input from people throughout the state.

We are doing educational presentations to groups throughout the state.

Tomorrow, we'll have our first public redistricting basics presentation via Zoom for anyone in the state who wants to attend that will have a live Q & A session at the end of it.

There'll be one in Spanish next week.

As I say, we continued to do these for groups throughout the state.

And part of that is to encourage them to take advantage of the numerous channels that we have for public input.

The statewide database at UC Berkeley, which is the body responsible for maintaining the state's redistricting database has developed for us a community input tool.

So people can go to drawmycacommunity.org and they can actually tell us about their community of interest.

They can give it a name, they can tell us where it is, they draw us a map of where it is with a fairly simple mapping tool that's included.

They can tell us what makes their community a community, what other communities nearby they might want to be grouped with in a district, as well as what nearby communities might not want to be grouped in a district with.

We are emphasizing to people that communities of interest are not districts, they are the building blocks of districts.

And we know because of the different numbers of districts that we have to draw for different levels, that we will have to combine different numbers of communities in different types of districts.

So this input through the input tool is very important.

People can email us directly at votersfirstact@crc.ca.gov.

They can write us at our regular mailing address if they want to provide input to us.

- Is that 721 Capitol Mall Suite 260 Sacramento, California?

So there's a lot of ways that they can reach you, but it seems kinda clunky because they aren't gonna have to know those specific things to go to.

What is the easiest way?

Is there a one-stop shop?

'Cause when I was researching for this interview, I went to We draw the Lines website where there's a lot of information and kinda the guidelines that you're having to follow and what so, can I say that that is probably the easiest place wedrawthelines.org?

is that one of the places we-- - wedrawthelinesca.org.

- wedrawthelinesca.org.

We'll put that on our website as well.

What are you hoping that you'll hear from the people?

What do you... Or within our district or throughout the state, what are you hoping to hear?

- As I say, we can get a lot of information that we need from other sources, but what we can't get is people's understanding of their communities of interest.

A community of interest is to some extent subjective, and we need the people of California to tell us what their communities of interest are, where they're located, so that when we start drawing actual districts and figuring out which communities of interest to group together in which districts we have as much input as possible.

And you're right, it's a big state.

We're hoping to get a lot of input.

And we know that we're going to have to have some help in helping us organize all of this input so that it will make sense when it comes time to use it.

- Having done this, or been in this electoral business for a long time as you have, is there any chances or how likely are the district's gonna look similar to what they look like now?

Are they gonna be just based on the population now that the Census is numbers have come in?

Is it gonna be anything close to what they look like now?

- We don't know.

A lot of that will depend on the amount and type of input that we get about the communities of interest.

I mean, we know that the 2010 commission did not have the luxury of time.

They got their Census results on time.

They were setting up a commission for the very first time.

And as they had said on a number of occasions, it was kind of like building the airplane as it was rolling down the runway.

We have more time, we have more time on the front end, we have more time on the back end.

We're trying to make good use of this and really encourage the people of California to give us the input that we need.

So if we get a lot more input and it's different from the input 10 years ago, the districts may look different.

- I just wanna ask about our native community.

How does this impact the Native American Community and their reservations?

Are they just, they are another group of interests?

Is that where they fall in?

- Yes, yes.

And we've had briefings from a number of different groups, but it seems, if I'm not wrong, it seems like we were briefed at one point that there was a Native American Community in Northern California, somewhere that actually got divided in the last round or potentially could have been divided.

So we wanna make sure that we hear from Native American Communities throughout the state.

California has one of the largest Native American populations of any state in the country.

And we really want to hear from Native American Communities throughout the state to ensure that we take them into consideration as we're doing.

- Absolutely.

How has the commission funded?

Who's paying?

Who's picking up the tab on this?

- Well, it is funded by the state.

There is a provision in the State Constitution establishing a minimum level of funding.

We have a budget.

We've recently submitted an updated budget to the legislature, along with a request for some additional funding due largely to the extended timeline that we're having to deal with, and the efforts that we're making to reach out to people throughout the state.

- In our last minute together, is there any kind of pitch you wanna make, any takeaway that you really want our community to know?

We've kind of expressed it, but if there's any kind of one last thing that you really wanna bring home to our listeners and viewers.

- My point really is we want to hear from people in all parts of the state.

People may feel like, "Oh, my community "isn't going to be touched by a boundary line "between this district and that district."

But we really do want to hear from people throughout the state about this process.

We believe very deeply that the more people that provide input into the process, the more broadly satisfactory the resulting maps will be.

- And when do you draw?

When is your part due?

When will we know what the new districts will look like?

- Well, that's a very good question.

Thanks to the legislature and some of the larger civil society groups in the state who last year filed suit against Secretary of State, Padilla to compel him to accept maps up to December 15th, assuming that the Census results were going to reach the state by July 31st.

The California State Supreme Court has actually ruled that we should have not only until December 15th, but if the Census results reach the state after July 31st, then that December 15th deadline should be adjusted on a day for day basis.

So if the results reach the state on September 30th, that's 61 days later, I believe it is, and our deadline would be December 15th plus 61 days.

We obviously don't know yet when we will receive the Census data.

So we won't be able to start that clock ticking until we actually receive the Census data.

- Until that point.

Well, Commissioner Ray Kennedy.

Thank you so much for your time.

You and the other commissioners, have your work cut out for you along with your staffers.

Thank you so much for sharing.

- Thank you for having us.

- [Narrator] This program was originally produced for 91.9 KVCR Radio.

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