See below for video of former U.S. House candidate Jennifer Lewis and former House of Delegates candidate Angela Lynn discussing “Amendment 1” – aka the “redistricting amendment” on Virginia’s ballot this fall – and why everyone should vote NO on it. Here are a few highlights:
- Lewis: Angela Lynn and Linda Perriello were both on the OneVirginia 2021 Board, and both now oppose the amendment. (Note: to read Linda Perriello’s thoughts on why she switched from supporting this amendment to opposing it, see here)
- Lewis: “After doing my own research, I decided…I agreed with Angela and Linda about voting no on Amendment One.”
- Lewis: “When you knock a door in rural Virginia, the majority of people are going to say I’m an independent, I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat…people want to feel that their voice counts, and that they don’t want either party having too much control. And so the main reason I’m against Amendment One and I will be voting no in November… is that this bill does not turn it over to an independent commission, which I believe it really needs to be. So this commission would still be made up of our elected officials and then the elected officials get to pick whoever they want to serve as a citizen board. So those people could be the husbands or wives, the friends, the lawyers, whoever it could be. These people are appointed by our elected officials, so in my opinion that does not make it an independent commission.”
- Lewis: “I’m really sad and disappointed to see the amount of outside of Virginia money coming into Virginia to push this bill. And so anytime I see any bill that’s getting dark dirty money, I question who is behind this, why are they supporting it, what’s going on. So again, this is a huge reason that I’m saying no on Amendment One, because I believe that dirty dark money has infiltrated Virginia once again.”
- Lewis: “There’s another bill that has already been passed…that ends gerrymandering. So this bill, Amendment One, doesn’t even address gerrymandering at all; I’m not even sure if gerrymandering is in this bill…What I support is making sure that we do this right…there’s a ton of misinformation going on…I beg of you to do your own research.”
- Lynn: “Importantly, this yes or no vote is not a yes or no, do I want to end gerrymandering, it’s yes or no, is this the process we want on our constitution. Not easily fixed after it’s on the constitution and horribly hard to remove once it’s on there…and the answer is no, it’s not what we’ve been professing. We were professing an independent commission, independent of the legislators; this is not independent of the legislators at all.”
- Lynn: “As Linda Perriello pointed out, it has the…accolades of reform but…it doesn’t have any reform in it.”
- Lynn: “It hurts me…after a lot of work to find that an amendment that was a good amendment got trashed and got tweaked to a point where it’s unrecognizable.”
- Lewis: “And tweaked behind closed doors. This was not a process that was open to the public, this is something that was done behind closed doors”
- Lewis: “This is an important vote and voting no does not mean it’s delayed to address redistricting in 10 years in the next census; that’s not true at all…When we think about putting something in our constitution we need it to be the best, we don’t need it to just be better…this is not the bill to vote yes on.”
- Lynn: “The biggest fallacy, too, is saying this is what we were working for. No, that’s not it. We had an amendment that we were working for and that was the independent commission, independent of legislators – we didn’t get that…”
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