Women's Work

Do you think your efforts will actually change what happens inside that room on Saturday?
There have been a lot of negotiations already. The report came out from the DNC lawyers [on Wednesday], which I think very deliberately set expectations. But this isn't about whether or not we're going to change the outcome. It's about saying, "Just a minute, here we are again: a group of people are getting together in a room somewhere to decide the outcome of an election." That just can't be how American democracy functions. We don't have any false illusions that we're going to turn the tide, but that doesn't preclude us and it shouldn't dampen our enthusiasm for not settling for this being how our democracy works.

So you think the outcome is precooked?
I think there have been a lot of backroom conversations, so it wouldn't surprise me if things have been worked out to a large degree before the meeting. But it's as much of a practical matter as anything. They would be there for six weeks hearing arguments if they didn't work through the bulk of the arguments in advance. So they'll hear a brief synopsis of each option argued by several sides, then they'll try to come to a decision in the afternoon.

What kind of outcome are you hoping to see?
Ideally, it would be an exact proportional representation of the votes that were cast. But I don't live in fantasyland. In Florida, it would be much easier to achieve that. In Michigan, because Senators [Barack] Obama and [John] Edwards took their names off the ballot, I can see how it makes the legal argument difficult. So it's not surprising that they're talking about 50 percent, because I don't know how else you settle a state where not all three names appeared on the ballot. But in Florida I think the results are clear.

Even though the candidates couldn't campaign there?
None of them were able to campaign there.

A lot of people see this as an attempt to rewrite the rules, since the Clinton campaign wasn't protesting the decision to strip away delegates at the time.
If people had known about this close outcome when this election season started, they would have done things differently. But at the moment I think it looked like the best deal. In hindsight [the estimated cost of a revote in Florida and Michigan] is nothing compared to what's being spent and the energy being expended over this problem now. And it's completely out of sync with what's happening in this country to eliminate two states just because they were naughty. We cannot lose what is being expressed in our country with this giant voter turnout. Not allowing every individual to speak their voice sends a signal that voting doesn't count, and we cannot continue to reinforce that idea.

What first prompted you to organize the group?
We started as a group of five women traveling around the country working together on the Hillary Clinton campaign. But while that's the single thing that galvanized our relationship with one another, there's a lot that happened during the campaign that made us say, "You know, when this is all over we really need to focus on this or that." What came up was the unbelievable enthusiasm and energy coming out of women who had never been involved in the political process before and who became active.