Early Voting, Financial Data Transparency, and New Guidelines for Transgender Students
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Michael Pope
I'm Michael Pope.
Thomas Bowman
I'm Thomas Bowman.
Michael Pope
And this is Pod Virginia, the podcast where it's Halloween every day of the year. Thomas, Halloween is my favorite holiday.
Thomas Bowman
It's a fun one.
Michael Pope
It is a fun one.
Thomas Bowman
But I haven't even decorated for fall yet. And now I've got a stress out thanks to you bringing it up reminding Rachel I'm kind of stressed out about decorating for Halloween. Now.
Michael Pope
You know, the thing about Halloween is it's a low stress holiday, you really don't have to stress out about it. I feel like people get way too stressed out about you know, Christmas season and—
Thomas Bowman
My neighbor goes big for Halloween and he like really fun like huge inflatables, like some kind of like scary thing. In the neighborhood kids like just flocked to his house, and then we're just sitting there with like, our $40 of decorations that we could afford. It's no comparison. Do you have anyone like that in your neighborhood?
Michael Pope
Yeah, you know, my neighborhood suffers from the fact that a few blocks away is a regionally popular block for Halloween trick or treaters. So people come from all over this part of Northern Virginia to come to this blog. So what you find it's kind of ironic, cuz you got all these kids in costumes that are literally walking by our house to get to the popular blog. So like, they don't even bother stopping at our house. They just walk right on by us to get to the popular blog. But that's fine. You know, it's since since the pandemic, we've made it kind of a street party where everyone goes out in the front lawns and just kind of hangs out outside and it's fun. It's Halloween is a fun holiday.
Thomas Bowman
All right, it's not Halloween yet, Michael, but it is election season.
Michael Pope
So let's get to the news. Virginia has 45 days of early voting, that's one of the longest in the country for casting a ballot before election day. But not everyone thinks it's a good idea, even people who take advantage of it.
Del. Phillip Scott
Last year when I was running, I wanted to get my vote done out of the way so that I could focus on engaging with the voters.
Michael Pope
That's Republican delegate Phillip Scott of Spotsylvania County. I spoke to him last week about his opposition to early voting. He says he's been hearing from election officials officials in his district that the requirement for 45 days of early voting that's an unfunded mandate, that drains staff resources and money from a system that's already overstretched.
Del. Phillip Scott
I chose to do it and I would be equally able to do it within two weeks. I think the convenience of two weeks versus 45 days is very minimal. You're still allowing a great window of opportunity for folks to actually go and cast their ballot with two weeks.
Michael Pope
All right, so Scott here... Delegate Scott admits that he himself took advantage of this early period the the the first two weeks of early voting, but he also says he has been hearing from registrar's that hey, it's probably a better idea to just focus on the last two weeks most people actually wait until the election is coming up. So it's not like the first two weeks that four week period is even all that popular necessarily. And you can save money by weight by holding off and then having those last two weeks and expanding the hours. This is his compromise effort here is focused on those last two weeks and make it so you could vote at night and it's not like you're bound to the business days. This is the argument that he's making. And that would not be as much of an economic drain on registrar's, why do you think Thomas?
Thomas Bowman
Well, I do think that registrar's being stressed is something that we should be paying attention to, because we do ask a lot of these people who are practically volunteers. And that Department of Elections does need much better funding so that it can perform all the duties that we ask of it. As far as election... the length of time for early voting, there's actually some pretty well established best practices that are backed by legitimate academic scientific research. One of those is having about a month for early voting. And if you actually go in and look at the numbers, which ended up favoring Glenn Younkin in 2021, you see somewhere between 15 and 20,000 people a day between when early voting opens mid September and like October 15. And then yes, there's a giant growth curve in those last couple of weeks of October. But the reality is, it's actually pretty steadily utilized as soon as it opens. Michael, you know, who really likes the idea of people voting? Civics teachers, check out what friend of the podcast, Delegate Schulyer VanValkenburg, had to say about voting.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
We have 1000s upon 1000s of people who use the first two weeks of that 45 days and when those people matter too... their votes matter too, and so if it was dozens of people showing up on the first day, I would be excited. I mean, as a civic teacher, I think anybody voting is great.
Michael Pope
I would agree people voting is great. I think everybody everybody would agree with that Republicans would agree with that Democrats would agree with that. Even people who feel like this might be a drain on the registrars agree early voting is a good thing. It's just a matter of how expensive is it how much of a drain it is on registrars? And, you know, if you look at the recent data that we've got, you were just talking about that 2021 data, those first two weeks, you know, they're they're real low numbers. So that is something to take into consideration. Schuyler VanValkenburg says, hey, they may be low numbers, but those people matter, too. So I mean, you got to balance all those things.
Thomas Bowman
I mean in person versus by mail, you're still looking at 15 to 20,000 people a day in those first few weeks. And that's a lot of people. I think the bigger issue is making sure that the Department of Elections has the resources and the funding that it needs to execute, based off what the academic best practices are, so that we have voting that's accessible. And Michael, I've already voted.
Thomas Bowman
Oh, you did?
Thomas Bowman
I did
Michael Pope
What was that, like your early voting? Describe the experience.
Thomas Bowman
Brief. Because there was only one ballot item up in the Richmond ballot this year. So it's really easy, and I signed up for automatic absentee as soon as that became a thing...I think that was a year or two ago. And so every time there's an election, they just mail me an absentee ballot as soon as the polls open for early voting. And I get it and I fill it out and I send it back. It's so easy.
Michael Pope
So in the mail, you receive an application for an absentee...
Thomas Bowman
No, they said, you can actually go on to the Virginia General Assembly website. And we should put this out in social media, maybe on Twitter or Facebook, because you can actually go and request recurring permanent absentee ballot and they send it to you--
Michael Pope
The actual ballot, not an application...
Thomas Bowman
The actual ballot, they send it to you automatically. It's so convenient.
Michael Pope
And then you you sent it via mail.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah--
Michael Pope
Or you dropped it off in a in one of the boxes, or I mean, obviously, you got a choice.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, you can do either one. I chose to just send it by USPS.
Michael Pope
But you could be one of those mules and stick it in a drop box, right?
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, you could stick it in a drop box, which is going to be your nearest local government office, most likely,
Michael Pope
Polls are open. So if you haven't already voted, think about doing it before election day, Thomas. I actually prefer voting on Election Day itself, which is problematic. I mean, it's and I don't even really know why I just it's, it's it feels, you know, like it just feels like voting.
Thomas Bowman
It's because you have so many election cycles of just good memories being at the polls. It did. It can be a big community event. I've worked plenty of election polls, and it's fun when everybody knows each other. There's like a esprit de corps with the community at least in past years. But I know what you mean. I feel it too.
Michael Pope
Yeah. One of the one of the reasons I like voting on Election Day is what you just said, it's like it's like you're you're there with your members of your community. And then the community that I live in you sometimes you see a celebrity, like for example, one person who shares my local precinct the local elementary school I vote at, there's another very prominent voter by the name of Mark Warner. Which brings us to our next story... Transparency in government... Getting your hands on a financial statement from your local government, well, that can be difficult. And then once you finally been able to track it down, sometimes the document is not formatted in a way where you can search the text. Judy Willard at Truth in Accounting says that can be really frustrating.
Judy Willard
Sometimes in these documents, they literally put a picture of a number, it's a JPEG, you can't search where they got that number. It's just Oh, here's the number. It's a picture of a number. Well, that looks really pretty on the document. But where'd you come up with that number?
Michael Pope
That's why my neighbor, Senator Mark Warner, introduced the Financial Data Transparency Act, which would require state and local governments submit their financial statements in a machine readable format. Marc Joffe at the Reason Foundation says corporations have already been doing this for years.
Marc Joffe
This type of disclosure, your machine readable disclosure, is something that has been required of corporations by the Securities and Exchange Commission since 2009. And I think now 13 years later, it's high time that state and local government follows.
Michael Pope
Yeah, it is high time. And I mean, many of our listeners probably haven't had this frustration that I have, but because I collect government documents and use them for my work, I mean, I'm often banging my head against the wall that I've got all this time and effort and sometimes even expense getting these government documents, and then you're trying to search for keywords, and you can't search because they actually save it as an image. And so, man, that's frustrating. So, when I found out about this bill, I was like, hallelujah. Finally, somebody's talking to somebody who's taking this stuff seriously. The bill has already passed the House of Representatives. It's now being considered in the Senate. Hopefully, Senate, Senator Warner can be successful in getting it on the Senate Calendar. But you know, Thomas, what the heck is going on with the Senate Calendar? Like what's should these people should be doing more stuff, shouldn't they?
Thomas Bowman
Well, you know, I couldn't tell you what's going on with the Senate Calendar, the Senate is always its own thing. And its own club, and I don't get invited to the to their meetings.
Michael Pope
I don't either.
Thomas Bowman
I can tell you just how easy it is to get a smart scanner that scans in all those paper documents into machine readable formats, it costs less than $500. For one that we actually utilize here. Jackleg Media, but I've had it since I worked for Delegate Krizek and digitized all his files, at least up to the point that I was working for him. So it was all searchable for the next LA.
Michael Pope
That's great. That's great. You've you've made life easier for LA's for generations to come I'm sure.
Thomas Bowman
Well, at least the next guy.
Michael Pope
So that's that was good for your office, and the amount of documents that you are dealing with. This group Truth in Accounting, they literally collect documents, they collect these financial reports from every state, and then also these financial reports for every municipality. So we're talking about every financial statement that every government does. And so, you know, taking that approach with all of those governments is just not really workable.
Thomas Bowman
You have to change your process a little bit... Or rather, you just adapt your process. The technology has existed for quite some time and it is affordable.
Michael Pope
That's the thing that's frustrating about this, this is this is not like new technology, we're talking about this technology has been around a very long time. So it's I mean, like, we're dragging state and local governments into the 90s. Shout out to Truth in Accounting. By the way, there's this group that collects all these government documents and puts them together in a way where you can compare apples to apples. And one thing I always love doing is looking at their state by state look at state debt. So Thomas, I know you well know people in Virginia, elected officials in Virginia love to pat themselves on the back about Virginia having a balanced budget. Well guess what Virginia does not have a balanced budget, there is a billion dollar debt. That's actually a pretty low number. So they give the group actually gives Virginia a C as an average for its finances. Many other states have debts that are way larger than that. But the only reason we know about the billion dollar debt is the financial statement through Truth in Accounting.
Thomas Bowman
Well, I'm getting a distinct sense that we need to spend a long form Thursday Pod Virginia episode on how that works, Michael, because I actually bought into the sales pitch. I thought we always had to have a balanced budget. Of course, I understand fundamentally about how like, issuing bonds goes and paying all that stuff off. But when you hear time in and time out that the reason we can't do something is because we have to balance the budget every year. Well, it's time to dive into just how that works right?
Michael Pope
A podcast about debt spending in Virginia? Yeah, let's do it.
Thomas Bowman
It will be riveting stuff, we promise you. For our audience it'd be riveting. All right, but I think it's time to get in to those new guidelines for transgender students, Michael.
Michael Pope
Guidelines for transgender students. All right, let's get into this stuff. There was this controversial proposal, guideline model policy from our governor. This is not controversial. But wait, it's not controversial.
Thomas Bowman
Oh, thanks!
Michael Pope
That was Governor Glenn Younkin talking to Sean Hannity on Fox News. Now, Younkin is trying to do a 180 here. Rejecting those old guidelines from Ralph Northam that said schools should honor the wishes of students who want to use the bathroom of the gender that they identify with. Governor Youngkin wants to move in the opposite direction telling schools to adopt policies protecting the right of teachers to misgender students.
Glenn Youngkin
Children do not belong to the state, they belong to families. And when a child is wrestling with this kind of decision, a parent should absolutely be the primary counselor advisor and helper in wrestling with this decision.
Thomas Bowman
You know who could probably have given the Governor some advice about this? Delegate Danica Roem, she's the first transgender delegate, as you know, and she probably--probably--would have helped him come up with a better plan. But, the Governor never called her check out what Delegate Roam had to say about the involvement of the transgender community in crafting his guidelines.
Danica Roem
He has my cell phone number, he could have called me. He chose not to. So then well, we go public. That's how this works. And he thinks that, you know, this was just going to be easy for him. One, it's not. Second, if you thought this was gonna be legal for him, it's not. And third, if he thought that he was going to just, you know, make politics out of this at the expense of his constituents and my constituents alike, oh, hell no!
Michael Pope
Oh, hell no! Mic drop moment from Delegate Danica Roam. I don't know that there's too much more to add to that other than the fact that I mean, if we look ahead here to what we're going to see, there is a public comment period, a 30-day public comment period that opens today, September 26, is the first day of the public comment period that ends Wednesday, October 26, at which time the guidelines will become active. ...unless the state receives input during the 30 day comment period that makes them change their mind. So if you want to submit comments about these guidelines, you can go to the state website called Town Hall, townhall.gov... Virginia government Town Hall, and tell the state what you think about these guidelines that require transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender that they were assigned at birth, rather than the gender that they identify with. And also Thomas, this pronoun issue is really got me. So I mean, like the one of the one of the guidelines talks about these pronouns, and it says the teachers have a constitutionally a First Amendment right to misgender students. And if they want to misgender the students then their right is protected under these guidelines--and, you know, by extension, the actual US Constitution. What about the right of the student? What about the right of the student who identifies with a gender? They don't have the right to be spoken of in the way that they want to be spoken of? And the teachers, right--The teacher who consistently misgenders them has a constitutionally protected rights to bully, the transgender student. That's what these guidelines say?
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack about all of this, Michael. But first, I want to point out that we are actually in the midst of what is called a trans genocide. That's actually genocide. And genocide, by the way doesn't mean a bunch of dead bodies on the side of the road. It's not necessarily doesn't need to be present for it to be a genocide. Part of genocide includes erasing culture and denying people their culture. And this is part of what's happening to the trans community who also by the way, are getting murdered or attacked at higher rates than non trans people. So the disgusting cruelty is part of the throughline here. And I personally find it completely despicable to use your state office to bully trans kids because that's what's happening here. Teachers are the state in public school, they are the state. And that policy violates equal protection under the law, that whole clause that's written required for the state to have interactions with the citizens. So those trans kids, their rights are being violated because the state is not treating them equally.
Michael Pope
Important point here to the process is these guidelines are it's not the law. So government, Governor Youngkin was on one of these television talk shows and talked about this is the force of law, these local school boards have to take action. That's the law. Well, it's actually not the law. It's just a guideline. So it's something it's it's it's a document that the Department of Education puts out, and local school divisions can either adopted or thrown in the garbage can and move on with their lives, right. There is no requirement that they adopt these guidelines. And I would hazard a guess that many of them won't. I mean, if you look at the experience with Northam's guidelines, that were the opposite. That said that you've got to respect the gender identity of these children. Of the 133 school divisions in Virginia only 13--only 13--adopted Northam's guidelines. Most of them said we're gonna keep our existing policies, thank you very much. And nine of them took a vote to explicitly reject the Northam guidelines.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah
Michael Pope
So, you know, not a great track record on the Northam guidelines, I can't imagine the Youngkin guidelines will achieve much more success, I guess we'll have to find out. My guess is a few of the very conservative of the school divisions will adopt them, most of them will take no action. And then some of them will take a vote to explicitly reject them. I mean, I can I can certainly see especially northern Virginia school boards being really eager to get to that school board meeting so that they can press the button to reject these things, and then go out on the campaign trail to say I took a vote to reject these these these transgender policies. So yeah, I would imagine that very few school divisions actually end up doing this.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah. And Michael, I don't know if you ever got a chance to watch Madmen. But there's a great quote from madmen, where the main character, Don Draper says, "If you don't like what they're saying, change the conversation." And that's part of Glenn Youngkin's strategy here. Republicans are getting beat up going into this election season... on abortion, and on the just sheer number of crimes that Donald Trump committed. So they're tired of talking about abortion, they're tired of talking about January 6, and that time that a bunch of people committed treason. So...Oh, and by the way, the classified documents at Mar a Lago. So there are a lot of reasons for Republicans, and ambitious Republicans, to want to change the conversation. And that is what this effort is. And we at Pod Virginia are actually probably not going to play into that. And this was one of the few times we're actually going to talk about this unless there's actually real news, because there's a lot still to come, there's gonna have to be lawsuits and those are going to take time. And, Michael, to your point, many of the school divisions who have already adopted, affirming...gender affirming trans policies are not going to go back to the drawing board, and now write gender exclusionary trans policies, they're not going to do that, at least in Arlington, Fairfax, Richmond, and some of these other more liberal or left leaning localities. And by the way, just like none of the right leaning localities ever had gender affirming policies in the first place after that law.
Michael Pope
That's that's a really good point, Thomas, it's also worth pointing out, there's no penalty for not adopting these guidelines. These are, there is no enforcement on this, there's no penalty for not doing it. There is theoretically in the future, the governor might tie something to jurisdiction. So in other words, in order to get money, you have to have adopted these guidelines, or, you know, in order to get some sort of federal grant, you have to have adopted these guidelines.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah
Michael Pope
I think that is still open. I mean, I can I can envision a future where the Governor's people would tie something to these guidelines...
Thomas Bowman
If he really wants to push that issue. It's possible. Of course, that couldn't really happen until the next General Assembly session sometime in Q1 next year. So, like we said, there's a lot that still has to play out. And by then it could all be a moot point, depending on how some of these court proceedings go. But you know, the the bottom line here is that this is providing a state-sanctioned excuse to be cruel. That's what this is. But Michael, we don't want to let him to find the issue or the amount of time that we talk about this. So we're gonna leave it here, because that's a lot to say. But that's all the time we have this week. So hey, if you're gonna be in Richmond, two weeks from now, come by, say hi.
Michael Pope
Yeah, we want you to come by we're going to be at the Resonate Podcast Festival, which is at the Institute for Contemporary Art, and we'd love to see you. Maybe if we get enough fans and listeners to Pod Virginia, maybe we could even do a performance of some sort like we could all hang out and record a podcast together. That sounds like fun.
Thomas Bowman
Oh, well when you said performance Michael, I thought we were gonna get to watch you either sing and dance or do some kind of dramatic, interpretive artistic thing.
Michael Pope
You know, I earlier I was talking about Halloween is my favorite holiday. When I first moved to Old Town I did walking tours of Old Town Alexandria in this ridiculous colonial getup, which you know, with the hat and the lantern and the whole thing so I, for the right price, I break out my old colonial costume and do a performance.
Thomas Bowman
So the Festival is going to feature some live performances of shows called Appearances and Love and Radio. So Michael, you and I are going to have to record an episode while we're there. If we've got an audience, maybe they can come say hi.
