Hey, folks, welcome back to Head in the Office. Today you'll be listening to an interview that Gage and I conducted with Christy McGillivray about a week ago. She is the executive director of voters, not politicians, and her organization currently is working on a ballot petition to get money out of politics here in Michigan. We talked all about her ballot petition, how to get money out of politics, wealth, inequality, and democracy, and how those two things interact, and how we might find our way out of this hellscape one day. It's an interview that you won't want to miss, and I hope you can forgive us for not giving you your regularly scheduled programming. I promise we'll be back on track next week, but this was a great interview and you won't want to miss it. If you want to support the show, head over to patreon.com slash head in the office pod.

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So without further ado, thank you for tuning in.

Let us know what you think.

And I hope you enjoy the show.

We are now happy to be joined by Christy McGillivray, the executive director of voters,

not politicians.

Thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Of course. Glad to be here. For being here. So give us in our audience just a brief overview of your organization, your position within and what you guys do.

Well, I'm new. I have been on the job since July. So I like to point that out because I think Voters Not Politicians is kind kind of spectacular and I cannot take much credit

for what they did. But voters not politicians was a completely grassroots group that organized itself

in 2016 and 2017 to put a gerrymandering reform measure on the ballot directly with Michigan voters.

And in 2015, the kind of powers that be in politics were like, this is too complicated.

Voters are not going to be able to understand this.

Nope, we're not going to do it.

And voters, not politicians, which again started as like a group of

people that didn't even know each other that were furious about the first Trump administration.

They said, no, we can do something about this. So they collected hundreds of thousands of

signatures with an entirely volunteer army. And everyone literally said it couldn't be done. And they did it. They got it on the ballot.

They ran a campaign and it won. So we have much more fair maps now in Michigan and politicians

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