Voter suppression in Missouri

Evelyn Maddox and Donna Hoch of the League of Women Voters of Kansas City, Jackson, Clay and Platte Counties, Missouri, join Radio Active Magazine host Spencer Graves to discuss voter suppression in Missouri.

Voter suppression is an issue in Kansas, also, as witnessed by the comments of Amber Stenger, President of the League of Women Voters of Johnson County, Kansas, 2021-03-30, on “Making Sure People’s Votes Do Matter“.

Evelyn Maddox is State Chair of the Voter Protection Committee for the League of Women Voters of Missouri.  As State Chair, she is liaison for the Voter Protection efforts of Missouri’s 10 local Leagues which have over 1,200 members. She is also the immediate Past President of the Missouri League of Women Voters and a Past President of the League of Women Voters of Kansas City and Jackson, Clay and Platte Counties, Missouri.

Donna Hoch (pronounced “Hoke”) has been a member of the League of Women Voters of Kansas City and Jackson, Clay and Platte Counties for 48 years.  She has been a member of the statewide Missouri Voter Protection Coalition for the past 6 years andx regularly coordinates Election Poll Monitoring for the Kansas City League.    In her years as a League member, she has served on the Kansas City board as Co-President, 2nd Vice President, Voter Service Chair, Observer Corps Chair, Membership Chair, co-chair of the state-wide Early Voting Study and participated on many other League committees.

The discussion includes brief mention of redistricting and gerrymandering, including two tools to facilitate citizen involvement in this process:

• Districtr, a free, public web tool for district and community identification, managed by the MGGG Redistricting Lab at Tufts University.
• PlanScore to evaluate the fairness of proposed district maps.

The current schedule for Radio Active Magazine for December 7 anticipates a more in-depth discussion of these tools and why citizen involvement is so important: When politicians have drawn district boundaries, they’ve often tended to amplify the power of those who draw the maps at the expense of common citizens.  The result in Massachusetts in 1812 included a district northeast of Boston, Massachusetts, which looked to a political cartoonist like a salamander, which he called a “Gerry-mander” after then-Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry.

Videos with transcripts of earlier interviews Spencer did on this subject are available via the Wikiversity article on, “Electoral integrity in the United States“.

Copyright 2021 Spencer Graves, Evelyn Maddox and Donna Hoch, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.

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