By Chris Satullo

As I write these words, it is 9:57 a.m. on Wednesday, March 18. At this very moment, I was supposed to be in the Main Rotunda of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, about to launch an event called PA Map Day, an event I’d spent four months planning.

What was PA Map Day supposed to do? Gather hundreds of citizens of all ages from all over the Commonwealth, from Erie to Wilkes-Barre, Penn Hills to Bryn Mawr, to send this message to state lawmakers: We’ve come to slay the gerrymander. Your self-protective scam is done. The jig is up.

It’s a message that aroused citizens have been sending to state governments across the land over the last two years, in Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Utah, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and New Hampshire. In those places, redistricting reforms seen as hopelessly idealistic three years ago have been pushed to the mountaintop by citizen activism.

Gerrymandering is the dark art of drawing district lines on an election map to tilt the playing field sharply in the direction of one political party or class of candidates (e.g. incumbents). It is, simply put, cheating. Every election, it steals the meaning of millions of votes. It wounds democracy.

Gerrymandering has been around since the dawn of the Republic. In the last round of map-making in 2011, though, two digital developments – sophisticated mapping software and Big Data – took it nuclear, enabling political operatives to do the deed with diabolical precision. 

Maps done then – particularly in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland and Wisconsin – were laser-targeted strikes against fair elections. (Both parties, Democrats and Republicans, gerrymander, whenever they get the chance.)

But, obviously, PA Map Day – a bipartisan cry of resistance to this evil – is not happening now. Instead I’m sitting in my kitchen, tapping away on my laptop, sipping coffee and gazing across the table at my wife as we figure out what to do with another day of homebound isolation thanks to the coronavirus.

Yes, in the age of pandemic, shit like the cancellation of PA Map Day happens – over and over and over, across America, at a scale unlike any we’ve ever seen. Post 9/11 America seems like a picnic by comparison.

In the space of  barely a fortnight, the virus has laid waste to thousands of anticipated events and passion projects, not to mention trillions of dollars in wealth. But this PA Map Day, this capstone event of an initiative called Draw the Lines PA, this cause into which I’ve poured time, energy, creativity and Turnpike miles for the last four years, was my particular jawn.

So I’m compelled to pull some meaning out of its collapse. Bear with me as I try.

Draw the Lines, which I designed and helped launch for the Committee of Seventy good-government group, put into the hands of students and voters the same data and digital tools that the political pros use to draw their cheating lines.

The goals: Show people that they could, with just a little effort, draw valid election maps that were clearly superior to the jagged nonsense they’d been getting out of their state capitals. Show young people in particular that their skills as digital natives were just the thing needed to end this anti-democratic scourge and restore people’s belief that their votes really would count.

Idealistic? Sure, but damned if it didn’t kind of work.

In the 20 months since we formally launched, more than 10,000 people took part, more than 5,000 maps were created, with more than a thousand valid congressional or state legislative maps of Pennsylvania being completed. A couple of sound gerrymandering reform bills got introduced in Harrisburg. Political pragmatism was beginning to align with reform dreams. An outside chance existed one of them might pass, with a boost from us.

Every step of the way, Draw the Lines has had to battle the public’s corrosive distrust of government, a deep-seated cynicism about the worth of citizen action. I know the evidence for cynicism is vast. I still maintain:

Cynicism is easy. Citizenship is hard, but worth it. Too many Americans have gotten too used to making the easy choice.

To urge folks to change, though, to coax them to return to the hard work of paying attention, getting sound information, shedding ideological blinders and taking useful action, you have to be able to look them in the eye and say:

It’s not all corrupt and hopeless. Your work will be worth it. We can make it so your vote will count in a fair election. We can make it so lawmakers will have to attend to your needs because they fear your vote next time.

In a gerrymandered state like Pennsylvania, you can’t offer that reassurance. In too many ZIP codes, it’s just not true. People know that – or at least sense it.

That’s why, in that cold dawn many of us endured in November 2016, when I asked myself what I, with my quirky set of skills, could do to help my country, I chose to fight gerrymandering. 

Gerrymandering is – as I often said while we were launching the project, unaware of the poignant irony to come – the virus in the operating system of democracy. If you didn’t attack and contain the virus first, the whole system would collapse under the weight of corruption, mistrust and cynicism.

That, for sure, was happening in my beloved country as we began designing Draw the Lines and seeking funds to make it real.

Some were losing the will to pay attention, turning away from public issues to tune into HGTV on the fitness club treadmill, filling their heads with Facebook phantoms and YouTube trifles. Others were succumbing to the siren call of cocksure voices, whether on the left or right, telling tell them they wouldn’t have to worry about a thing if they would only vote once to put the right great man, the right visionary prophet, into power. 

For decades, after all, we’ve been living in a nation where one major political party constantly tells people not to trust or rely on government for anything, while actively trying to make it harder for people (at least people interested in changing the status quo power arrangements) to vote.

For nearly four long years, we’ve been living in a nation where the president lies daily, then tells his followers to ignore the truth-telling journalists who call him on his lies because they are “enemies of the people” and “fake news.”

We are encouraged, both by professional merchants of division and the algorithms of social media, to distrust, denounce, shun and despise our fellow citizens, our fellow voyagers in this leaky boat called democracy, should they dare to have a different opinion, like different music, pray a different way, love a different way or trace roots to a different land.

We have been told, and some of us believe, that this cramped devotion to tribe, this disdain for fact and expertise, this readiness to denounce and shun, this hunkering down in our carefully curated bubbles, is the path to safety.

Then along comes COVID-19.

Along comes a lethal crisis that demands a comprehensive response by all levels of government – one driven by fact and foresight, by expertise and competence, by trustworthy judgment and leadership that inspires us to heed the better angels of our nature. A response that will fall short unless buoyed by public trust in the guidance given – and competence shown – by heads of government.

Alas, thanks to years of elections tainted by gerrymandering, vote suppression and the court-led erosion of campaign finance rules, we find that the Oval Office, the West Wing, much of the Capitol and many of the other offices in the grand buildings that line the National Mall are nearly bereft of such expertise and leadership.

Thanks to the intentional undermining of trust in government, we also get the scary spectacle of millions of Americans putting their own health, and the health of others, at risk, because they ideologically disdain the experts and officials who are telling them the hard truth. Instead, these folks seek comfort in Fox-spun fantasies.

We are facing a crisis that will require us to summon deep reserves of patience, compassion, good will, generosity, ingenuity, humor, sacrifice and trust. All things that the recent rituals of politics and social media have been trying to beat out of us. All things that PA Map Day, in its own, minor way, was meant to support.

May God help us.

Because Walmart opening up its parking lots so people can seek test kits that don’t yet exist and Google taking credit for a digital tool it hasn’t yet built just might not be enough to get us through this.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.