ABOUT THE Politalks:
The media directs our attention to hot-button political issues in congress: abortion laws, gun regulations, marijuana legalization...all topics that happen to be highly controversial and feed the [often unproductive] contention in our two-party system.
This might seem obvious to the evening news regular, since all the issues everyday Americans find controversial must be the most relevant ones to our civic lives, right?
Wrong. At least, I venture to say so.
There's a highly underrated and underrepresented political issue that seeps into every pore of our civic life. It influences the way our votes are tallied and, ultimately, how much our vote counts. It's clearly important, and it's hard to imagine that any American--no matter what their stance on abortion laws, gun regulations, or marijuana legalization--would find it a debatable issue at all: fair and equal representation.
We take it for granted that every individual vote has equal weight, but this isn't always true. Through congressional redistricting, a decennial process done by state legislatures to redraw voting district lines according to the new census data, the voting power of different demographic populations and political parties is constantly manipulated.
ThePolitalks explores different perspectives concerning redistricting policies and explores the venues available to everyday citizens to influence the way their districts are drawn.
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I'm Sahara Khan, an undergraduate Liberal Arts Honors student at The University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Latin American Languages/ Cultures and minoring in Women and Gender Studies. Aspiring to go to law school upon graduation, I partake in the Jefferson Scholars' Core Texts and Ideas program (CTI), as well as Bridging Disciplines' Public Policy Program (BDP).
As part of BDP, I am currently participating in a legislative research internship with Vote Smart, a non-profit, non-partisan political research organization that aims to deliver "just the facts" by filtering out hyperbolized language from the media and technical jargon from bill texts.
With the guidance of my mentor, Dr. Pablo Postigo Olsson, I designed The Politalks​ to track my experiences and progress throughout my internship with Vote Smart. Throughout the semester, I'll also be posting interviews, journal entries, reflective thoughts, and research tidbits to develop a collection of references for my personal redistricting research.
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Key links:
Public Policy Bridging Disciplines Program at UT Austin: https://ugs.utexas.edu/bdp/programs/pp
Vote Smart Database: http://votesmart.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahara-reddy-khan
Dr. Olsson: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/spanish/faculty/pp9596​
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