Book on grass-roots efforts to save representative democracy recognizes Reclaim Idaho

Reclaim Idaho’s Medicaid Express successfully engineered a citizen referendum to expand Medicaid benefits and found its way into a recent book on how Americans are taking back their governments from politicians who rig legislative district maps and gerrymander themselves into districts that are not representative of the overall electorate.

“Unrigged,” by investigative reporter David Daley, is the story of local citizens rising up at the state and local level with ballot initiatives to restore representative democracy across America. Daley traveled the length and breadth of states to interview and observe local citizens taking the will of the people to the ballot box and challenging the laws, practices and decisions of governments that do not reflect the will of the majority.

In the case of Medicaid expansion, it was Idaho’s Republican-dominated state Legislature that refused to expand Medicaid, as allowed under the Affordable Care Act, and denied thousands of Idahoans who lack health insurance access to coverage. But Reclaim Idaho, a grass-roots effort by Luke Mayville, and Garrett and Emily Strizich — who took a 1977 Dodge RV on the road from Sandpoint to collect 60,000 signatures — succeeded in getting the proposition to expand Medicaid on the ballot in November 2018.

Reclaim Idaho thought the conservative Legislature did not represent the views of Idahoans on the subject of providing basic health care to those without insurance. Sure enough, Reclaim Idaho was right: 60% of Idahoans backed the ballot measure, informing the Republicans in the Legislature and the governor that it’s time to look after more than 60,000 Idahoans, all because they refused to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid years ago.

The overwhelming vote highlighted the contrast between the Legislature’s refusal to expand Medicaid and the will of the people they supposedly represent. In a state as red as Idaho, there is no way to achieve a 60% majority on such an issue without the votes of Republicans and Independents, along with what might be considered more predictable Democratic support.

What Daley uncovers in “Unrigged” is just how unrepresentative many state and local governments are today, in light of the latest demographics showing a more enlightened and compassionate electorate than many Legislatures reflect, regardless of party affiliation.

Americans are standing up to entrenched and unaccountable state legislatures that should have more competitive election results. If there is a prime mover in this recent takeover of state legislatures by extremists who no longer represent majorities, it’s REDMAP, a national Republican strategy short for Redistricting Majority Project. The title suggests a manipulation of a nationwide transformation of a voter profile that favors Democratic candidates rather than Republicans. The GOP solution: voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering that helps keep Republicans in control, even when they are no longer in the majority.

“Unrigged” documents how average citizens turned the tables on the REDMAP movement in states such as Michigan, where millennial Katie Fahey decided to take on one of the most malapportioned legislatures in the U.S. and created Voters Not Politicians. It would gain ballot access for a proposal to create an independent redistricting commission.

Fahey and citizens from across Michigan challenged the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party, which partnered to manipulate legislative district maps to benefit Republicans who did not see a future in the state’s changing demographics. Thanks to the Voters Not Politicians project, which managed to get the question on the ballot in 2018, more than 61% of voters approved a new independent redistricting commission — and now voters, not politicians, will decide how legislative districts are drawn.

It also tells the story of Desmonde Meade, a former drug addict who received a 15-year sentence for felony weapon possession, earned his law degree and eventually led the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to restore the right to vote to Florida’s former felons. The conservative Florida Legislature’s thoughts on the matter were hardly how the people of Florida felt. When the vote was tallied on whether to let former felons vote, almost 65% of Floridians chose to restore their voting rights, proving once again that conservative state legislatures are out of touch with the more enlightened views of the electorate.

Daley asks in “Unrigged” what happens to a representative democracy when one party is no longer committed to the foundational notion that everyone must be represented equally. According to Daley, they can make voting harder or they can make it easier. With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, providing much of the national leadership, aided and abetted by strategists in various states, Republicans have chosen to gerrymander districts and enact laws that make it more difficult to vote.

Voter fraud is the bogeyman that Republican partisans trot out to justify their many proposals to narrow access to the ballot. Daley explodes the myth of voter fraud by reporting on former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, at one point the Republican Party’s point man on voter fraud. Kobach’s moment in the sun came when he had the opportunity in federal court, before a judge appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush, to prove voter fraud. Kobach authored a stringent new registration process that he claimed was needed to fight voter fraud.

In the end, the judge threw the book at Kobach and his theories, not only declaring his proposal unconstitutional, but also sending him to six hours of legal education. In Daley’s words, Kobach was all hat and no cattle, which applies as well to the national Republican strategy to deny voters their rights by claiming fraud.

It may have taken a federal judge to prove Kobach and his voter fraud allegations groundless, but “Unrigged” also has documented the work of average citizens at the grass-roots level unrigging a system of barriers that jeopardizes the most precious right of a democracy: the right to vote.