Your right to vote is under attack and it's hanging by a thread.

From aggressive gerrymandering to Supreme Court challenges aimed squarely at the Voting Rights Act,

free and fair elections are under an unprecedented threat.

My guest today, Nicholas Stepanopoulos, is one of the nation's foremost experts on election law.

He's a professor at Harvard Law School and the leading authority on redistricting

and gerrymandering. He joins me to discuss how we got to this moment, why the Supreme Court

is poised to dismantle the most important part of the Voting Rights Act and what this all means

for upcoming elections. But before we get into it, subscribe to this channel to stay informed

about how you can defend democracy. Nick Stephanopoulos, welcome to defending democracy.

Thank you very much for having me, Mark.

I have been looking forward to this conversation because you are, I mean, we know each other and we're friends,

but you are probably the nation's leading expert on redistricting.

And in particular, questions of how one judges what are and are not

fair districts. So this is something for people out there who are watching that is sort of an

intuitive thing that both strikes you when you see it, but also is elusive because what one person would say is fair,

for example, districts that allow for competitiveness is not necessarily what someone else

thinks is fair, which is districts that allow different groups of voters to elect their candidates

a choice, right? You might have one person that says if there are 10 districts, what's fair is, and you have two equal, you have two parties, both at 50%. One side would say what's fair is five districts that would vote for the Democrat and five districts would vote for the Republican. Another person would say, no, what you actually want is 10 districts that either party could win. So since you're the expert, why don't

you tell us, how do you think conceptually, and then we'll get into the practicalities, how do you

think conceptually about the question of fairness? Yeah, great. So you're right that there are lots of different goals in redistricting.

And so because of that, it can be hard to agree on whether a given map is good or not.

It depends on which objectives we're talking about.

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