Hello friends welcome delighted to have you here as always and today we are talking

about something that is truly very detrimental to our democracy something that we should be paying attention to, and

that is the topic of gerrymandering.

I have a guest who has written a phenomenal book about the history of gerrymandering in the United States,

which by the way you're going to find out is a uniquely American problem.

So I have Nick Seabrook with me today. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

I'm very excited to talk about this topic because this is something that y'all have been telling me that you want to know more about you want the history and and you also want to know what we can do about it. So thank you Nick for joining me today.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

I would love for you to just give listeners a little overview of how you became interested

in this topic and how you even set out to write sort of a definitive work on this.

Sure, so my day job is that I am a professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. And I've been doing that for about 12 years now. And I would say that my desire to write this book was motivated partly by just a general interest in civic engagement in education. I do quite a bit of work with the Florida Department of Education as part of their civic literacy initiative, which really tries to kind of prepare the next generation of democratic citizens to ensure that everyone who's graduating out of our public

K through 12 schools here in Florida and our public universities has kind of the

knowledge and the tools to be a good democratic citizen.

And I would say that my interest in this topic

has also been inspired by my own experience

as an immigrant to the United States. I'm one of those professors who kind of ended up in this job because I went to college and I liked it so much that I never left and eventually I ran out of degrees that I could earn and decided to apply for teaching jobs.

But at the same time, I've also been going through the process of immigrating to the United States going through various different visas,

ultimately earlier this year becoming a US citizen and it's really emphasized to me the

importance of civic engagement, the importance of people voting in elections as just just the baseline, but also just being interested in politics politics keeping an eye on what's going on in their communities because that's really the only way that elected representatives can be held accountable for what they do.

And we can ensure that the policies that they put in place reflect what we want as citizens.

And there's really a sore lack of that, I think, in American government right now for a variety of reasons,

but I think gerrymandering is one of the reasons why our government is so dysfunctional. And that kind of inspired me to dive into the history of this topic. I discovered that gerrymandering is older than the United States itself. It's been going on throughout our history, but I also discovered that it's a bigger problem today than it's ever really been before because the latest generation of politicians have access to all of this sophisticated data on where people live who they tend to vote for and they also have access to this really sophisticated technology that they can use to kind of simulate how districts will perform under a variety of conditions and that allows them to draw the

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