Making Government Responsive: Sam Oliker-Friedland: Sam Oliker-Friedland
October 19th, 2023
“Government service delivery is democracy policy.”
Sam Oliker-Friedland is the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsive Government and a former Department of Justice voting rights litigator at the Civil Rights Division. We discuss the promise of automation for good governance and democracy.
There is a lot of good pro-voter legislation being implemented in states from Nevada to Michigan, Pennsylvania to New York. The success of automatic voter registration laws are fertile ground for better public policy making and better governance across the board. Practical public policy is impact forward. It takes account of on the ground implementation and of the political reality in the states. And then it goes back to see if the policy did achieve the desired impact.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Sam Oliker Friedland
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Sam Oliker-Friedland Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:23] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's no secret that government sometimes seems maddeningly inefficient and not properly serving us, the taxpayers. I'm sure everyone who's listening to this episode has had a personal interaction with the DMV, or filing your taxes, or voting that we wish had been better. In fact, given years of attacks from the right about government being the problem, not to mention the Big Lie conspiracy being touted on a regular basis, Americans have little faith in the functioning of government. And I know it's easy to be cynical and shrug off these experiences as life's inconveniences, but it's actually important. Because government, and indeed democracy itself, derives its power from the people. So today, we're going to explore how our government can be more responsive to the needs of real human beings.
Our guest today is Sam Oliker-Friedland. He's the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government. Previously, he was a voting rights litigator at the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division under both the Obama and Trump administrations. Welcome, Sam. Thank you for joining us.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:01:52] Thank you so much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:54] The Institute for Responsive Government is all about efficiency, efficacy, and accessibility. And a big part of your organization's focus is on voting. Since you were a voting rights litigator at the Department of Justice, tell us how you came to make the transition from there to this work of building responsive government.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:02:14] Great question. And it really was a journey. So, you know, I started out my career as a litigator at the Department of Justice, as you mentioned. Litigation is really different than the work I do now and the work we all do at IRG. It's adversarial. You know, in my mind, in some ways should be the last solution to a problem that we can solve maybe by getting in a room, getting together, talking something out, and trying to identify points of commonalities. And so I have incredible respect for my colleagues who do litigation across the country. It is a skill set that I didn't feel like I was able to sustain that level of engagement for my entire career. I really like working on policy issues, where there's still room for both sides to come together, to come up with concrete solutions that help real people coming together, stating what our concerns are, stating what we think the problems are, and identifying if there's any solutions that meet everyone in the rooms concerns. And this is where our focus on voting policy really is. It's those common sense, practical solutions that really make government deliver for people the way they expect it to. We came to this work from work with center for Secure and Modern Elections on automatic voter registration, in particular for other areas of democracy policy. So how can we use data that the government already has to make people's lives easier? How can we streamline these customer service transactions, like the DMV that you mentioned, both in a way that gets people registered to vote and gets their registrations updated, but also makes them walk out thinking, "I just had a great experience at the DMV, and that experience of the government then makes me want to participate in our democracy more." So, this is our attempt to use some of those lessons for sort of all areas of democracy policy. And we really do think that government service delivery is democracy policy.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:58] So since we talked about voting to start, let's stick to that topic for now. You know, when it comes to being responsive to the people in terms of voting, what does that look like to you?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:04:10] I think it means that our democracy includes every eligible voter. So so in most cases, that's US citizens above the age of 18. And I think the denominator that we have to start with really is every eligible voter. And so if if we're not including everyone in there, how can we create avenues like automatic voter registration at the DMV or automatic voter registration at Medicaid offices, maybe, that expand that denominator to really include everyone who's eligible, I think in a sort of frog slowly boiling kind of way, we don't really realize how much the sort of participation
gaps really are a crisis in our democracy. The fact that that 60% or 70% of people participating, which means 30% or 40% of people not participating, would be considered phenomenal for an off year election and good for a presidential election. That's a crisis to me. And it says to me that we're not setting the system up for success. We're not setting the system up to work with the way real people's lives are, because if they felt that they were getting something out of it and that this was sort of accessible to them, we would have higher participation rates. So that's the sort of problem statement that we work with. And then let's just tackle concrete policy solutions that can help us build towards that goal of our democracy, really looking like the United States.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:29] Well, you just mentioned automatic voter registration. So what are the lessons that you learned there in making automatic voter registration possible? And how does this translate, if you think about it nationwide, in getting more people out to vote to access those 30% to 40% of the American public, that is not voting.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:05:50] It's a policy that has not been as polarized traditionally as some other voting policies. So I love talking about it for that reason. I also love talking about it because it's an incredibly powerful solution to a lot of different problems. So I like to say a good automatic voter registration system has two jobs: register as many eligible citizens as possible; and two, don't make any mistakes. And that really sort of has something for everyone in it, because I think on the left, you hear a lot about wanting to increase voter access, increase participation, and on the right you often hear about election integrity. And there's a number of good faith actors on the right who really do believe that our election system needs more security features. And this is a policy that gives something to both of those camps. Colorado's gold standard automatic voter registration system ends up registering a little over 99% of the eligible voters walking through the DMV doors. That's a phenomenal number. We don't want voter registration updates to get lost here. Actually, the majority of transactions in an automatic voter registration system are going to be updates. That means that when I move and if I tell the DMV that I moved, that should also update my voter record. And that's a great example of how I think our election system and our voting system needs to sort of treat people's time with respect. If they take the time to tell the government that they've moved, we shouldn't be sort of nitpicking. They told this agency, but not that agency. They told the DMV, but not elections. They told the Post Office, but not elections. Let's just use that notification they gave to government generally to update
that voter record, make sure they're registered and eligible in their new home. They're getting information from their election officials about where to vote and how to vote in their new home, and that the voter lists are accurate. And this is really where some of those win wins come in. So so the system, in addition to sort of getting people ready to vote, getting people all sort of buttoned and bowed so that they can participate, is also cleaning the voter rolls. So the best way to make sure that we're keeping accurate voter rolls is to update them when people move automatically. And sort of the last piece here is this is the DMV is in many ways the sort of most robust identity verification we do at any point in American society. I just moved to Illinois about a year ago, and I had to bring to the DMV here a bunch of different sort of documents that prove my residence, my citizenship, etcetera. And so if you're concerned about election integrity, great. Let's use that moment when I'm bringing all those different pieces of proof to also register me to vote, at the moment that I'm bringing those pieces of proof. And then everyone can sort of breathe a little bit easier that, that no one is sort of usually mistakenly sort of ending up on the voter rolls who shouldn't. And so that's one of the reasons you hear me talking about automatic voter registration a lot is it encompasses sort of a little bit of everything that we're trying to do at IRG. It's government service delivery the way people expect. It's a practical solution to a real problem in our system, and it gives a little something to everyone in terms of sort of policy upsides.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:47] Hmm. Yeah. I love that you point out that when you go to the DMV and you get a new driver's license, you have to prove to them who you are, which is like the number one way to have election integrity, if you will. But so since you mentioned that Colorado is the gold standard, 99% of people with the driver's license got registered in this way. So what is the voter turnout there?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:09:12] Oh, that's a great question. I don't have the exact statistics at my fingertips, but it's one of the highest in the country, along with Oregon, which also has a gold standard automatic voter registration system. One of the most unexpected and heartwarming effects of automatic voter registration -- We have the best data out of Oregon because they've had it now for about seven years -- is that automatically registered voters are turning out at almost the same rate as non automatically registered voters. So it turns out that once we do the work of getting people on the list once, we don't sort of make them fill out another form that includes information they've already given us. They're willing to participate. You have organizers
and election officials who who have their name and address on the rolls and can sort of reach out and invite them to participate in our democracy. I like that you bring that up, because voter registration is the first step in a multi-step process. You know, we are doing a lot of work trying to sort of eliminate the barrier of voter registration, but that's just the first wall that needs to come down. Then there's an entire sort of neighbor to neighbor process of convincing people that democratic participation is worth it to them. And the first step, we need them on the rolls to be able to do that. The states with the best voter turnout in the country, which includes Colorado and Oregon, two gold standard states, still has a lot of room to grow. And I think that's where you get into some of the other policies that make voting easier, like ability to sort of choose how to vote, whether it's early in person, by mail, making sure we have sort of methods of casting a ballot that fit people's lives. But I think we're just at the beginning of a nationwide, self-organizing effort in some ways. If we set these systems up right, voting policy provides the scaffolding and communities fill that scaffolding in with meaningful work that leads to participation.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:55] So when you say the rates are identical in Oregon, you're saying the number of people who are registered and the number of people who voted is almost identical?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:11:04] Sorry. Yeah. This is sort of an esoteric point, but it's actually so that voter turnout rates among people who get automatically registered actually come close to identical to the voter turnout rates among people who fill out a form to be registered themselves. So once we do automatic voter registration, it really is that sort of first step of inviting people into the process. And then they do seem to accept that invitation, which is really sort of a wonderful outcome.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:30] Right. So let me just translate this to make sure I understood this properly. What you're saying is that increased voter turnout. So if you were in any given state and you're doing a registration drive, and let's say you register a 10% more people, those 10% show up. And if you have automatic voter registration, the same number as if you had actually done the work to do it, would also show up.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:11:54] Exactly. It was sort of a really incredible finding.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:57] Ah. Interesting, interesting. So I guess you would say that this is the priority, and I know there's a bill in California to have automatic voter registration. Tell us a little bit about that bill and how does that differ from the other bills, or maybe it doesn't differ at all. Or if you are in a state that doesn't have automatic voter registration, how do we think about that and how do we get something like that passed?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:12:22] I love this example because it highlights a sort of political dynamic that fascinates me, that there is a sort of perception that blue states love voters, make everything easy. Love election, administration, policy. And red states are sort of making everything difficult. And there's absolutely some of that. But there are some real exceptions to those rules. And I'm happy to talk about some of the really interesting red states that you wouldn't expect to be making sort of improvements for voters that are. But the flip side of that is that you have some blue states, like California, that that really haven't done everything that they can to sort of make their election system accessible to all the people of the state. And so California has 4.75 million unregistered eligible voters. That's a lot. If the unregistered eligible voters of California were their own state, it would be larger than, I think, 25 other states.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:12] Wow.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:13:12] And there's a bill moving and sort of should be moving early next year, hopefully to fix this. This would create an automatic voter registration system in California, like that gold standard in Colorado or Oregon registers nearly every eligible voter at the DMV. Also would expand automatic voter registration out to Medicaid, which is a benefit agency that does very robust citizenship verification. So we think is a great sort of next step after that DMV, to expand your automatic voter registration system to. And you can catch a lot of voters that way that may not drive or may not go get a state ID card at the DMV. And so in terms of evening out, some of these persistent registration gaps we see by age and race and gender, both doing the DMV and expanding it out to Medicaid is the secret sauce. And I know the California legislature is going to be considering that bill early next year, and I sincerely hope they do, because I think it actually sets a bad example in many ways to have a state theoretically sort of controlled by folks who are who are talking a lot about wanting to subvert democracy and wanting to support voting. But with 4.75 million citizens of that state who are not even included in that denominator for participation, who are just like,
by definition, not included in democracy, I think that's a real problem that blue states actually should do a lot of work to confront. California's not alone there. New York has several million unregistered eligible voters, Illinois has several million unregistered eligible voters. And there's a lot of room to grow in all of those places to actually sort of even that out, for sure.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:44] I would say, though, in a place like New York City, where a lot of people don't drive and may not require a driver's license, they may not have to go to the DMV, like, ever. You know, most of New York State's population lives in New York City. So I think that's a big hole there.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:14:59] New York is sort of a little unique in there. Most states have a surprisingly high percentage of folks who will at least get a Non-driver ID card at the DMV. New York has a lower rate, as you would exactly expect than most states of that. And that's why I think one of the things we're most excited about is the expansion out to Medicaid, that you have the folks who are actually least likely to have a driver's license are most likely to be on Medicaid. You know, if you're capturing 99% of eligible citizens who receive Medicaid, that does a huge job towards evening that out. Oregon, which I mentioned has had that gold standard secure AVR system at their DMV for a while now, just passed a bill this year to expand it out to Medicaid. And they did some data analysis and found that of the total number of unregistered eligible voters left in Oregon, 85% of them are on Medicaid. So they can really come close by pairing those two programs to eliminating the burden of voter registration entirely. And I think they should be proud of achieving that. And in places like New York City, I think the breakdown is probably a little bit different than a number of places, but you just sort of need to, like, make sure that you're adding the right agencies to fill that pie, if that makes sense.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:12] We're taking a short break to hear about our sponsor, Shopify. And when we come back, Sam and I talk about making government more user friendly, using automation to share data across agencies to provide services to the people.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Sam Oliker-Friedland.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:33] One of the key tenets of responsive government definitely is being user friendly. And that's a no brainer, obviously. And in addition to automation for voting, like you just said, it's really great to get health care coverage access, for example, Medicaid. And that we shouldn't have to refill our information everywhere. I had a conversation with Art Chang on the podcast after he ran for mayor in New York, and he said, rightfully, that the government knows if you're low income. It's not that it's a secret. Government agencies should share information with each other so they can just give you your SNAP benefits or make access to Medicaid available without having to refill your information, you know, in different places over and over again, and not only doing that in triplicate or quadruplicate, but also the time that it takes. It's often very confusing to fill out the paperwork, I think, for a lot of them. So how do we get there? Like, what do we need to do to get the government to share information across agencies?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:19:40] You know, in some ways it's a very contextual problem. So I think you're going to find that the reason agency A is having trouble
working well with agency B is going to be a totally different problem than why agency C is having trouble working with agency D. This is all cultural and built up. And I say this as a former bureaucrat. So I say this with love like bureaucrat adding layers of complexity that maybe need to be there or maybe don't need to be there, and in any case would probably benefit from like coordinating the layers of complexity across different sectors of government. What I see as a sort of model here is when government agencies absolutely cannot do without working with another government agency and some of the sort of really incredible partnerships that have built up because of that. Just this is sort of a mundane example. But election officials, especially local election officials, cannot live without their IT departments. But often in many cases, they don't have their own IT staff. They have to deal with maybe sort of a county IT department and the step by step careful work, not collaboration for the sake of collaboration, but collaboration for the sake of solving a problem is going to be how we get to the place where agencies are really talking to each other and serving each other's needs, rather than sort of adding those bureaucratic layers of red tape or sludge, as Cass Sunstein would call it. I can't recommend highly enough new book by Jen Pahlka, called Recoding America, that's a lot about her work actually doing government technology and trying to sort of solve some problems in government that is about like using data and technology efficiently to serve people; and why isn't that happening. And I'm sort of ashamed to admit that one of the things that really struck me from that work, and some other work that I've read, is that lawyers are often the problem. So we are we lawyers are are are taking.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:34] Now you're pointing at yourself.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:21:34] Right, right, right, right. We we start out with a frame of like, how can we avoid every risk rather than how can we serve people? Too often it's like trying to sort of avoid risk to a benefit program by making sure you're asking a slightly different question on one benefit application, than another benefit application. But that means that people who want SNAP benefits for their family have to fill out a completely separate application than the people who want Medicaid benefits so they can take their kid to a doctor. And like feeding your family and taking your kid to the doctor are actually, not very different needs. And I think if we can get some of the lawyers or the legalistic thinking out of the way here and say, like, okay, "how does government get people to take their kids to the doctor? How does government get food
on people's tables?" If we approach the problem that way, in some ways, the solution sort of fall into this. As I mentioned, we're interested in sort of learning some of the lessons that the election space has learned from automatic voter registration for some of these other areas of government service. So, like people think a lot about tax filings, and I think about writing a check at the end of the year. But for many people, tax filing is how they get an earned income tax credit. That's money that the government owes them. That should be a benefit to their family. But we're still making people fill out forms to receive that, even when the government already knows that someone is eligible for an EITC check. So can we automate that process? If we know that you deserve a check from the government, let's send you a check without making you fill out a form.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:01] I mean, the government can do that. Other governments do that,
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:23:03] Right. Right.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:04] I have a friend in Switzerland. She gets a bill at the end of the year. The people in Hong Kong get a bill at the end of the year, because the government knows how much money you made. This is not a secret. So yes, you can either get a bill or you can get the EITC check.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:23:17] A few years ago, I made the calculation slightly wrong, and the IRS definitely knew that I got it wrong because they sent me a correction.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:23] Yes, yes, exactly.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:23:25] And why can't that sort of happen? But this is also a great example of of what I think has been a failure in the national policy space, a sort of failure of imagination about what can be done at the state level, which we absolutely see in the democracy space. There's so much attention on what Congress can or can't do around voting, and way too little attention on what states really are like knocking out of the ballpark. You know, I think that the automation of tax filing question gets stuck on the sort of near mythical, large tax filing company opposition in Congress to automating this, without anyone asking, what's the path to victory in states. Like, not every state has
an income tax, but the vast majority of states do. And they could all be automating this. Their state earned income tax credits that could be automated. And there's so much room to grow here that's not just sort of banging your head against the wall trying to get Congress to do something.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:16] Right. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I really think to your point about states hitting it out of the ballpark, I do think that we're not giving ourselves enough credit for the tremendous job that state governments across the nation did in 2020, in running secure elections in the middle of the pandemic because they made it accessible through having mail in, and and things that really, in a way, made it possible for more people to cast a ballot because it was made easier and in a way, because of that, made more secure. And so when you think about that, if we had been able to retain the advances that we made in 2020, which I know a lot of states got rid of, for example, in Texas, what would have been the next building block for higher voter turnout?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:25:07] One advance that we really retained out of 2020 that I think gets lost in this sometimes is that government officials, particularly election officials and particularly local election officials, these are the sort of county and city and town election officials who are doing the job of hiring poll workers, setting up polling places, sending out ballots, counting ballots, really most of the meat of the work of running an election. You know, this is a group of folks who's incredibly good at diligently following procedures in a nonpartisan way. And I think 2020 was really challenging around creative problem solving and really making it impossible to run the playbook that we have laid out for sort of the years past and the individual policies we can go through. What made it through 2020 in a permanent way. What what states like you mentioned, like Texas rolled back, but the overall story of local election officials rising to the occasion of creative problem solving, changing the way things are doing, responding to facts on the ground that were different from one week to the other, and still running. As you said, the most secure election in American history is an incredible story. And for all of this, they were doing it with too few resources, particularly too little money. This is one of the legacies of 2020 that I think is ongoing in a bad way, is that we haven't stepped up and solved these persistent resource problems that 2020 magnified, but have always been there for those local election officials. The Election Infrastructure Initiative estimated that over ten years, there's about $20 billion necessary to upgrade our election system to a sort of secure gold standard that really does serve voters.
Congress for the last few years has appropriated $75 million towards that. And so that's really not meeting the need. That's not stepping up the way they need to. And states can do the same thing. Most elections are funded through local property tax revenues. There's been some great news on this. States like Pennsylvania, New York, Minnesota, Idaho have stepped up with new appropriations for their local election officials. But but I think what I want to see move forward from 2020 is a recognition and gratitude for the creative, backbreaking work that election officials did in 2020 and then a recognition of that with the resources going forward they need to do their jobs. On the policy front, I think, yes, states like Texas have sort of looked at, for example, drive through voting, which worked really well in 2020. That was a great example of like, you couldn't design a better policy to meet voters where they are. They were literally in their cars. And the state of Texas responded to that by banning drive through voting, which, as far as I'm concerned, has no reason other than just animosity toward serving voters well. But there are some good things. So New York, which has long been behind the eight ball in voting and election policy, the governor just this past September signed a bill that would allow all New Yorkers to vote by mail for the first time in New York history without sort of needing an excuse. And that's huge. Michigan this year codified early voting, which worked well for them in 2020, and there's going to be nine days of early voting in Michigan moving forward. That's an incredible case of of seeing something work well in practice and then adding it to the statute book so that you can use it going forward. But really, like all of this is different in different places, like different political cultures, different election administration cultures, different rates of voting by mail versus voting in person. The local election officials in each jurisdiction know their voters needs the best. And so what I want to see nationwide is us giving them what they need in their particular county and their particular town in a multi million person county or 100 person town, what they need to serve the voters the way that they know their voters need to be served.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:50] So I'm curious about how IRG does its work. Do you interface with the elected representatives or government agencies, or how do you make your recommendations real?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:29:05] Yeah, so if we're doing our work well, if we are succeeding, we are creating positive feedback loops between policy implementation and politics. You cannot design policy without understanding the politics of a legislature,
the political context of a state, how people vote, how people interact with their government, how people feel about their government. You also can't design policy without interfacing with the government officials who have to implement that policy. Understanding what kind of technology they have, understanding which sort of layers of government, state, local, county, town need to be engaged in policy implementation. And critically, if you're actually incorporating both of those constituencies in every aspect of the policymaking process, they help you refine your policy and help make it better for the next time. And so where we've sort of landed, for example, on a gold standard, automatic voter registration policy is the result of work with secretaries of state, DMV directors, local election officials who now can focus on other things rather than processing paper forms. Politicians who were willing to take the political risk in enacting these policies. And all of that made it better. And so, for example, like they flagged both sort of implementers, and folks in the political landscape flagged that there was a need to expand out to Medicaid. And that was a sort of feedback loop that allowed us to then publish on this, draft bills, work closely with federal policymakers around the Health and Human Services department, and really make sure that we could turn what they were telling us needed to happen into reality. And so we work with all of the above. I think any policymakers who are not working closely with government officials, grassroots organizers, bureaucrats, industry experts who are running the technology is not doing policy right.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:54] Is not doing policy right? Sorry. What do you mean by that?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:31:00] This is another lawyers are the problem comment. I think too often you sort of have an idea and then you put your idea in a bill and then you think you're done, or you think you've sort of described this idea enough on paper and that that's the work of policy making. And it's not, it's really bringing the expert voices from government, from industry, from organizing to the table, and making sure that what you're crafting accurately reflects what they need. And I think that too often, policymaking is this "let's have a lot of ideas, talk about our ideas in Washington, D.C., and then write a nicely designed report." And to me, that's not policy work. Policy work is mostly happening in states. It's a collective effort. Yes, lawyers are at the table, but so are these other constituencies, and that's how you achieve impact.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:47] So when I was on your website, your home page says, "building a responsive government, one practical policy at a time." So in real terms, what does that mean? Define practical for us because I think this is getting at what you just explained.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:32:03] Yes. Yeah. No, I think that's a perfect sort of way to discuss this. So practical means, it means that there is a measurable impact of the policy that solves a problem in the real world. And so I will return to automatic voter registration for a second. That is a policy that solves a problem of unregistered eligible voters who are not participating in democracy. That's our problem. The impact is voters on the rolls. And the policy has a mechanic built into it that gets us from point A to point B, and that mechanic is sometimes missing in my mind in policy making. And so when I say practical, I mean impact forward: takes account of those implementation facts on the ground; takes account of the political reality in a state where you're working on that policy. And then we can go back and see if it's achieving impact. So you could imagine a world where you craft a policy, you have an idea of how it's going to get you from point A to point B, but once the bill is passed, once the policy is implemented, if you're not actually at point B, you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out what went wrong and go back and fix that. And that's all about having goals in mind, having strategies that get you towards those goals, like carefully applying tactics that you need as part of those strategies to achieve those goals, and then making sure to go back and measure your goals. And so for automatic voter registration, we celebrate when a bill is passed. That's a really positive step. But it's not the goal. The goal is getting voters on the rolls. And that doesn't happen until that policy is carefully implemented with the secretaries of state, with DMV directors, with organizers who are ready to take advantage of that new policy, to turn those new registrants into voters. And the participation numbers in places like Oregon and Colorado that have had these gold standard policies are what tells us that that policy was successful.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:52] Yeah. Thanks for articulating that. That is really helpful. I think, because like you said, a lot of people, when they think about policy, it's all kind of abstract, but it really... It's really about the outcomes. You know, what's going to happen? It's not just about passing the bill.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:34:05] Right. Right.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:06] Yeah.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:34:06] Great first step. Passing a bill is a wonderful first
step.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:10] Yeah. But not not not the end goal. So as I mentioned in the intro, the legitimacy of democracy comes in part from the government working for people. And at the end of September, the government is at the brink of shutting down again, of not working. And all because hard right Republicans are holding the whole nation hostage in order to make deep cuts in the budget. And so what do you and the Institute for Responsive Government make of this? Because clearly this is not responsive.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:34:43] Right. I mean, I think what you're seeing is a reflection of the fact that -- and this is not true in states. I want to be very clear. There are Republicans at the state level generally who are dedicated to make government work well, who do a great job of that. I think what you're seeing basically in the House of Representatives is that Republicans don't want government to work well for people. I think they have a theory of the case that we should dismantle government piece by piece. And that to me, it's fairly clear that that's their goal. And so it's hard to do policy. The flip side of what I said before about how I love sort of when folks with different political opinions can get together in a room, you know, say what they want and then come together on a sort of policy that gives everyone something they want. You can't really do that when when it's just a hostage situation. I'm really sad about the fact that they can't articulate what they want out of this, and that the collateral damage is dedicated public servants, and these are people who give up higher paying jobs, who give up a lot to serve the public. And when we sort of talk about government responsiveness, I think it's easy to think about agencies and computer systems. But government responsiveness is about people. When people have a good experience in the DMV, that's because the agent at the DMV was friendly, treated them with respect, made them feel like their time was valued. Ultimately, where the rubber meets the road on democracy policy and government responsiveness, policy is the people who serve their communities, and this is throwing a bomb into their lives, frankly, that I think is just unconscionable.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:13] Totally agree. I mean, I think a lot of people don't connect the dots that this means federal employees will be furloughed, the military will not get paid. Safety net services like veterans benefits, social security also will not get paid, but also sort of everyday things that people don't think of, like food inspections won't happen, right? You know, so like this, this is real for everybody because there's this one faction of the House of Representatives that wants to just make cuts and like you said, doesn't believe in government and wants to dismantle it.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:36:45] It tells me that there is a lot of work left to do on our side. For those of us who think that government is good, that government actually like creates important public services and generally makes people's lives better. That is something that I believe. I don't know if you remember those signs up, in sort of 2010, you know, the early Tea Party days of "keep your government off my Medicare;" "keep the government out of my social Security." And I think of that at this time when like, it's clear that there's a large swath of people who don't believe that the government serves them and don't believe that the government treats them with respect. And I think we can sort of use this as a signal that it's time to reimagine government and also reimagine how we communicate about government and how we communicate about what it's delivering for people, because it's quite clear that there's a large swath of the America to whom that message is not getting through.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:34] Well, so on that note, what are two things an everyday person could do to demand responsive government, or to communicate to and about government in a way that is helpful and to get responsive government?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:37:48] The first thing is that everyone can serve as an election official. Go serve as a poll worker. You can you can be on the front lines. You can sort of develop an understanding of how our election system works. That's going to leapfrog over most policymakers in the election administration space, go to powerthepolls.org. They will help you sign up to be a poll worker in your local community. It's a great way to say hi to your neighbors. It's a great way to learn about the process, and it's the perfect entry point to being a part of responsive government and a part of the solution here. The other thing is, you know, if you are someone who who thinks government is a positive, if you are pro-democracy, if you think we all benefit
from coming together with our neighbors to do this sort of weird dance, of forming a government and forming all these agencies and forming all these public services, take the time to thank public servants. Election officials have had a hard few years, in my conversations with DMV officials. I think that's one of the most thankless jobs there is in American government. You know, if you had a great experience getting your driver's license, tell someone that. Thank them. I think our public officials don't get thanked enough. And then maybe when you're done thanking them, consider a career in public service yourself. I had the privilege of getting to give a talk on democracy to a very privileged private school audience recently, and I said, like, "who here thinks they want to grow up to be a doctor?" A bunch of people raise their hand. And I said, "who here wants to grow up to be a medicaid administrator?" And very few people raise their hand. And I want people to think of Medicaid administrators who get people health care, who help families take their kids to the doctor, as every bit an important part of the American public health ecosystem as your primary care doctor. And so, like participate as a poll worker. Use that to get your feet wet. Thank your public servants that you interact with in your daily life. And then think about how and whether you might want to become one.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:39] Great advice. So as we are rounding out our conversation here today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:39:49] All of the wins this year in state legislatures make me incredibly proud and happy. So Minnesota this year restored rights to returning citizens, enacted secure automatic voter registration among a number of pro-voter policies. New Mexico passed the New Mexico Voting Rights Act, which basically did everything they could have done to make New Mexico's election system more accessible and more secure. At the same time, I mentioned that New York just passed a bill to allow every New Yorker to vote by mail if they choose to do so. Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania just announced in September that Pennsylvania would be enacting automatic voter registration at their Penn Department of Transportation offices and a number of other victories that are too numerous for me to sort of name on this podcast. There's so much good news. I think we're going to see some pro voter bills moving in California to do automatic voter registration there. Michigan, which has enacted a number of pro voter bills, is still considering more from September through the end of the year. And I think some of that gets lost when all we're hearing about is states like Texas doing things like rolling back drive through voting, when all we hear about is what Trump is saying about
democracy on Twitter. It's easy to sort of tune out the good news, but there has been so much of it this year.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:00] Well, thank you for reminding us about the good news. This is indeed good news and should make all of us hopeful. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:41:11] Thank you for having me. And thank you for talking about how government can serve people. It's so much fun to talk about.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:19] Sam Oliker-Friedland is the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government. Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Nick Suplina. He's the senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in America.
Nick Suplina: [00:41:42] Things are looking good. I can't say enough that the problem of gun violence is huge and complex, and patience is a real necessity if you're organizing or advocating in this space. But this is a huge moment. I mean, the first meaningful federal legislation in 30 years is a big, big deal for our movement. And the policies in it are really, really strong.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:05] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:42:43] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.