especially in latino populationless, you're going to have greater difficulty making your baseline under section five. the application of citizen data could be retrogress sive in the citizen voting rights act. this merits further consideration. the second issue is, because you need citizens of equal numbers or roughly equal numbers to make districts, it makes it harder to california section two voting rights act remedies because you need to have generally compact minorities who vote cohesively and are capable of -- in order to have an equal opportunity to elect a candidate, you're going to have to reach farther to get these populations if you're using only citizen data and equalizing it across all districts regardless of whether it's a remedy or not. so there are very real incouple brenss to limiting law designed

to obtain equal access that arise under citizen apportionment. this effort, as i indicated, it's very seductive, very interesting because it starts with the assumes of the individual voting right. but it points to a larger political issue when we talk about rights and liberties in the united states in the context of the vote which is that the argument for the representative model which is the one we currently use in apportioning political power articulated by judge kosinski and his partial assent in garza, this approach assumes there are inherent rights to the political process. the assumption of the individual right to vote turns representation to a privilege. it turns it into the assumption of a vote as privilege. in the political firmt of the

united states, this notion of rights as inalienable and inherent verses privileges earned is one of the principle divisions in american politics. i'm not speaking as a legal scholar. i'm a political scientist. i think of this in the context of democratic theory. this seems to be a difference that defines where people and their politics come down in support or opposition to this approach. and it is where the debate will be held, because until the court engages this ambiguity, those individuals who seek to define voting as a privilege, will continue to run at concepts of qualification for apportioning power, qualification for voting based upon the notion of earned privilege rather than inherent rights. >> so thank you. i also wanted to thank diane at

the levin center and scan ford law school for having me here today. what i'd like to talk about is more what in the first panel was talked about as the denominator of the question. i want to talk about who the voters are and who are the people who we're drawing these lines around, particularly in the state of california what those folks look like from the standpoint of their ethno racial identification. so i'm just going to provide you some simple slides to help you visualize some of what was just alluded to in terms of the issues of who votes in the state of california, and to the extent to which who votes actually looks like the population of the state of california. so the first slide summarizes the likely voter population. these data are from the public policy institute of california which defines likely voters not just as people who say they're likely to vote because most people lie when they answer that question. but also they do an index of

questions. so people who express political interests, people who say they've been following the election. people who say they voted in the past and who plan on voting in the future. it's a little better of a measure than saying just do you plan to vote. nonlatino whites in the state of california are over represented among likely voter to the tune of about 25%. i start with the likely voter category because these are the folks not only who are most likely to turn out. these are the folks who are most likely to be polled by polling organizations. many polling organizations focus their polling not only during election years but in other years on those people who are seen as comprising the electorate. if you're not a likely voter, you're less likely to be called by those polling organizations. therefore, represent stifs are less likely to hear about what your interests or needs are. so this is an important category of voters within the american political system. those nonlatino whites are more

wealthy and more educated than the rest of the voting age population in the state of california. you can see african-americans are more or less at parity in their population. what we know from 50 years of political behavior research and political science is that socioeconomic status is the greatest predictor of how you're going to vote. that doesn't completely work with african-americans. many people attribute this to the history of the fight for voting rights and the ways in which that community voting has different value attached to it. so, therefore, people vote more than you would expect given other structural constraints. latinos and asian-americans are significantly underrepresented in this population. some of that underrepresentation is because of the large noncitizen populations in those groups. so among latinos it's about 40%. among asian-americans more or less 50% folks who are voting age are noncitizens and unable to participate in politics.

among latinos you have a large under age population. because latinos tend to be young younger than other groups in the state of california, you have larger group that is under 18 and ineligible to vote. you have a combination of factors driving these differences. there is also a gap, a significant gap in registration rates particularly among latinos and asian-americans that keep them from having a voice in the electorate at the same level that they would given their population numbers. and so in these ways, and the things i would like folks to think about is that the electorate is a political product. so we've been talking about the structures. it was alluded to in the first panel how the redistricting process makes people see the legislature, have a sense of their own political power, how that's led to term limits and other things. it also does lead people to not engage in the process. we have that disengagement

affecting different groups of people differently which then affects the qualities of decisions that policymakers are making. to say that i think -- sometimes when we talk about redistricting, the voting population is seen as kind of static. it's there and we have to draw lines around it. in fact, part of what you're doing with that process is, in fact, creating that voting population through our politics. the nice thing about this poll is they actually interview infrequent voters and people who are not registered which is usually not the case in polling. again, this is just for the state of california. these are 2011 numbers compared to census data from 2010. we see among infrequent voters you have overrepresentation of nonlatino whites. you latinos still even among infrequent voters not voting at their population rate. and again, asian-americans. you can see we have many african makers are not likely vote

evers. they vote, but they vote infrequently. finally if we look at the nonregistered in the state of california, it's almost the flip of what we saw in the first slide, the unregistered in california tend to be latino and asian-american disproportionately to either nonlatino white or african-american. finally i want to talk about what are the potential political implications of this? why should we care whether or not people are actually voting at the rate that they should given their proportion of the poch lags. one of my colleagues eric shikler and others have written at least at the national level that if everybody voted, elections wouldn't be very different. but seoully hodge gnaw from ucsd came out with a nice book looking at local elections and said if you would change at the local and state level, it would have a very strong impact on the types of policies that happen because you have a large enough number of people to actually impact the policy making process. we get some sense of that from

this slide if we look at just party identification among likely voters verses infrequent voters. again, who is a likely voter is racialized in this context. we have to remember that. much higher independents. for those of you who aren't from california, these are the kind of people who don't claim a political party. in fact, independence is the fastest growing party identification among latinos in the state of california and nationally. that is a really important factor that i think much of the redistricting conversation doesn't capture when we think about part zen ship. the fact that you have large portions of this new electorate that are not identify being the current structure and don't really know where to go and what that means in terms of both affecting their turnout since we know partisanship has a strong

impact on turnout, but also how engaged they feel in the system. when we talk about voters i think in the national race, again, seoully hodge nall just came out with a book called why americans don't join the party where they talk about the fact that independent voters are much more likely to be of color than white even though i think the perception in the national media is sort of soccer moms and you have middle class white folks that are in the middle of terms of sbg disasterist when, in fact, you have a lot of voters of color who, in fact, either are centrists or don't feel tremendously attached to either party because the parties aren't necessarily speaking to their interest. there's the cyclical process where you're not identified, not voting. therefore, policymakers aren't responding to your needs and so, therefore, you remain detached. thinking about the electorate is part of our politics rather than something that is fixed is a way to start this conversation.

thinking about noncitizenship, we talked about the idea of moving toward citizen voting that would have a tremendous impact in the state of california. in fact, we just got access to some really nice data from the office of immigration statistics where they gave us the legal permanent resident data and nationalization rates by county across the state. usually you can't get that level of geographic detail from that agency. we found that half of the mexicans in the united states who are eligible for citizenship, people who have been legal permanent residents. just to think about the scale of the problem in terms of the number of folks who are out of the process who are noncitizens, basically because they just haven't submitted themselves to the $675 charge all the legal requirements it takes in order to naturalize. if they were to naturalize, you could have changes in the size of the electorate.

our lech tart is not reflective of the people who live here who use government services and have an interest in what government does. i want to spend a couple minutes talking about what we can do about it. i had the proif of being part of a really unique project which ann was one of our partners in. the james irving foundation launched the california votes initiative which was designed to change the electorate in the state of california. they hired three academics, i was among them, to val late the voter mobilization work in southern california and the central valley try to motivate low propensity voters and to come up with a set of best practices as to what works with these populations. these are folks that normally -- political campaigns don't mobilize because the presumption is it's a waste of honey and they weren't turn out and vote

anyway. at the time when this initiative was launched it wasn't clear that door-to-door efforts or the things we know work with other voters would, in fact, work with these communities. the good thing was that, yes, if you invite somebody in person or either by phone or on their doorstep to participate in the process, even if you're a low propensity voter, those voex will turn out. that's important to know for campaigns that this is something that needs to happen. we had interesting findings that, if you run phone banks. they ran phone banks in nine languages. they deserve a tremendous amount of applause for just the logistical process involved in there. it's complicated. but they did. if you ask people in the first round whether or not they're going to vote and they say yes. there is a small group of people who say no. if you focus on the people who said yes which one would assume

they have a proclivity, some disportion toward voting, you get double digit increases in turnout. that is, in fact, a really important finding. so i think just to try to close, i think the important things to think about in terms of what the electorate looks like and what it means in terms of public policy, in places like california you don't have entities doing that kind of on the ground door-to-door work at the scale needed in order to change these numbers that i've shown you on these slides, and that part of what's going on with the idea of -- how many votes does it take to win a district? the fact of the matter is, a political campaign only needs 50.1% of the vote, whether it's 12 people or 24 people doesn't matter to them. what matters to them.

the fact of the matter is they have very little structural incentives to do so. in the state of california, we have hundreds of thousands of new voters that come into the system. neither the democrats or republicans want to touch them because they don't know if they will vote for them. that's what matters to a political party. i think thinking about how do we build structures into the system so when we have the redistricting and the potential for representation, we work to create an electorate that is reflective of the population that those lines are drawn around. with that, i'll turn it over.

thanks so much. so i'm going to start with a brief presentation of asian-american pacific islander demographic krigs ticks and then discuss how these dynamics shaped our involvement in the past statewide redistricting process. as of the 2010 census, there were nearly 5.6 million asian-americans, about 290,000 pacific islanders in the state of california making up about 15% and one percent of the state's population respectively. asian-american and pacific island communities in california are growing proportionately between 2000 and 2010, the state's asian-american population grew by 34%. pacific islanders grew 29%. by comparison, latinos, a healthy rate of growth, 28%, native americans at 15, african-americans at 17. in contrast, the nonhispanic

white population decreased 5% over the past decade. so while asian-americans are geographically disbursed throughout the states, they're more concentrated in urban centers. over one quarter of california's asian-american population, nearly 1.5 million foekts, live in los angeles county alone. yet asian-americans in other counties are growing at much faster rates. among the ten counties with the largest asian-american pom lagses, asian-americans are growing fastest in places like riverside, sacramento, contra costa, orange and san diego counties. while asian-american communities in los angeles and san francisco continue to grow, those peripheral urban centers are growing at much faster rates. historically growth in asian mary khan communities has been due to immigration. this means disproportionate

numbers of asian-americans are foreign born. asian-americans are the only racial group whose population is majority immigrant. by comparison 39% of latinos and 21% of pacific islanders were born outside of the united states. only 10% of native americans, 9% of nonhispanic whites and 6% of african-americans were foreign born. asian-americans are ethnically diverse. while filipinos and chinese americans together make up roughly anti half of all asian-americans living in california, the asian-american community includes a multitude of ethnic groups speaking dozens of languages, while rates of growth are high within nearly every ethnic group. the fastest growing are south asian with indian, pakistani, sri lankan and bangladesh she communities in california growing dramatically. with that ethnic diversity comes social and economic diversity.

poverty is one of many indicators that illustrate that diversity as you can see looking at this chart, filipino, indian and japanese americans, have pov very difficult rates equal to or lower than nonhispanic whites. southeastern asian-americans exceed those of african-americans and latinos. that's a quick demographic overview of the api community. how did these demographic features impact our involvement in california statewide redistricting process? because most asian-american and pacific islander communities engaged in redistricting statewide, couldn't rely on a legal hammer. organizing was a critical tool, given the concentration of asian-american and pacific islander communities in several population centers.

throughout the state it was necessary to develop a statewide network to organize our community's involvement. we call that state white network metro l.a., san diego valley, orange county and san diego. we served as the lead agency providing legal research mapping. >> a local partner convened a coalition of community stakeholders to establish regional priorities and testify before the citizen's redistricting commission. stakeholders were mostly representatives from community based organizations and interested community members.

while some local elected officials participated, members of congress, state assembly, state senate, their staff, those closely tied to partisan politics were prohibited from participating. eej regional coalition held four meetings to educate stakeholders about redistricting, identify communities of interests, floor mapping scenarios and decide on a map. regional coalitions also identified members to present testimony rarding their priorities to the commission. the geographic dispersion of an ethnic diversity within asian-american and pacific islander communities presented challenges. often our regional meetings failed to draw stakeholders from more remote areas and changing locations. still meant stakeholders from different parts of the region didn't see each other face to face as often as we would have lixd. a related problem with trying to solicit input from a variety of

ethnic groups meant targeted outreach and one on one communication sometimes between leaders that had no prior relationship. so clearly these demographically driven community dynamics impacted our organizing. how they affected our ability to use the law to protect asian-american pacific islander communities. here i'll discuss the ability to draw majority asian-american districts. latino districts sometimes affected small asian-american communities and racial lip molar rised voting. growth in the asian-american community which you saw was dramatic, resulted in california's first asian-american district in the san gabrielle valley of loss angsless, state assembly district 49 on your screen. this area is home to the mainland united states's first majority asian-american city, monterey park, and surrounding

majority or near majority asian-american sit teens including el ham bra, rose meade and san gabriel. interesting, this region of l.a. is also very latino. in fact, it's crate ld by a majority of latino districts. state assembly districts 51 to the west, 58 and 57 to the south and 48 to the east. so establishing it as a protected district and demonstrating how it could be drawn was a major achievement. growth in latino population over the past decade also prevented new opportunities for greater latino influence. one area in which advocates were exploring possibilities was in the central valley where you see on your screen, where adjacent section two and section five seals for latinos were already in place. so while advocates here were

looking to protect the voting rights of growing latino communities among americans in fresno were looking to maintain the integrity of their community which you see outlined in green there. sorry, rather small. i wanted to make sure you got the big picture here. the community argued it shared much in common with the latino community, similar poverty rates, unemployment, educational attainment, language barriers and the two should be drawn into a majority latino district. ultimately neither latinos got what they wanted demographic changes here in the central valley certainly created the potential for conflict between latinos and asians as something

that we were largely able to resolve in our organizations. okay. so those are two examples of how demographic changes shaped dynamics in areas where asian-americans and latinos both live in large numbers. obviously racially polarized voting must also be proven to trigger section two protections. here diversity in asian-american communities can pose challenges to demonstrating that kind of political cohesion. we only commissioned an rpd analysis in the west san gabriel valley region which you saw, where majority asian-american district could be drawn and the asian-american community was more ethnically homogenous. in his analysis of about 11 contests, professor matt ber rare rose showed asian-americans voting for asian-american candidates and nonasian-american

voters voting against those candidates. the question, would that be the case in areas like fremont, milpitas and bare es is a where asian-american communities with becoming more diverse. it's a question that should be answered as wed move into 2021. given limitations the supreme court has placed on the use of race in redistricting and the fact that we could really only draw one reasonable majority asian-american district statewide, demonstrating communities of interest was particularly important. obviously the question is isn't this difficult when you have kind of a community of communities with so much social and economic diversity. to identify communities of interesting, we convene stakeholders in each region and led them through an exercise in which they talked about the problems facing their communities and the ties that bind them. in every region stakeholders talked about tim grant character

of their communities, about language barriers, about educating english language learners in schools. certainly there were regional differences, folks in fresno talked about the extreme poverty facing the mole land american community while folks in santa clara talked about the high tech industry. more often than not such social and economic diversity wasn't as prevalent in contiguous areas that could reasonably be drawn into the same district. just to give you a sense of the type of data that we presented to the commission, here is a table we submitted in support of testimony in san diego which included population characteristics that reflected communities of interest identified in our regional meetings there. folks in san diego were concerned with immigrant issues and problems with language access in particular. those in the north county were also concerned about the power that wealthier folks in

fairbanks ranch and rancho santa fe would wield if they were drawn in the same district that they represented. san francisco is a great example of how one of our regional coalitions chose to prioritize the needs of low income immigrant communities of interest over the possibility of drawing a majority asian-american state assembly district in san francisco. here you can see the purple area in the eastern part of the peninsula is that kind of low income community of interest. asian-american in parts, latino in the mission. to the west we've got sunset and richmond hiring asian-american communities. to the south, the beige area is daly city and south san francisco where there are a large number of filipinos.

certainly in some courses there's pressure to create -- try to maximize the asian-american population in those districts. certainly our coalitions recognize the limits of the law, but also really i think the work was informed by the kinds of priorities that they had and the work they were doing where folks were really -- felt like low income, asian-american immigrants would be better served by being included or drawn into the same district as low income latino districts. so these were districts that were adopted that more or less resemble the proposal that we had submitted to the commission. so hopefully that gives you a sense as to what's we did and how changing demographics impacted our work. as we look to 2021, we