Sophia Lynn Lakin

If they do things, if they make policies that

are bad for their communities or bad for their well-being or bad for their economic opportunity, you want voters to be able to speak to that, right, at the ballot box.

And gerrymandering really turns that on its head.

And you get the, you know, politicians, you've, I'm sure, heard this many times, and I will say it again, you know, politicians shouldn't be choosing their voters.

Voters should be choosing their politicians.

And that's, you know, gerrymandering flips the

what we should be seeing in a democracy on its head.

I would not say that in the least.

Right.

That is that is the false equivalency that, you know, people are calling it when they're celebrating this Louisiana versus Kelly decision.

Right.

What voters of color have been asking for and what the Voting Rights Act had been protecting is just an opportunity to participate on equal terms.

in that political process and bring them up to basic fairness.

And that is what is being, I think, undersold here or completely perverted when people talk about what's going on with this ruling, with what vote dilution means, diminishing voters of color, and what we've all been trying, the project of the Voting Rights Act for the last 60 years.

That is unfortunately part of the problem.

And, you know, one of the things that, you know, certainly we at the ACLU partners across the board have been trying to yell the top of our lungs, right?

How do we shift that narrative?

How do we get people to understand that you don't,

cure racism or the effects of centuries of Jim Crow and structural inequality and all the things that we aspire to and that there's a promise of the Reconstruction Amendments, there's a promise of our country, there's a promise of being here, calling ourselves American, right, by ignoring problems in order to fix them.

You need to wrestle with them in order to