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President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Mitchell Jr., Patricia Roberts Harris, and other guests at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.
Yoichi Okamoto - Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
How the Voting Rights Act Reshaped Texas’ Electoral Maps
May 28, 2026
In 2002, U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a Republican, nearly lost his South Texas seat to Democrat Henry Cuellar. So when the GOP used its newfound majority in the state Legislature to redraw the voting maps the next year, they sawed through Cuellar’s hometown of Laredo and scattered Latino voters, who tended to vote Democratic, into other districts.
Latino advocacy groups sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the cornerstone provision of the law that prevents government bodies from diluting the voting power of specific groups. The Supreme Court found Texas lawmakers had taken away Latino voting power “because they were about to exercise it.”
“Latino voters were poised to elect their candidate of choice,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The State not only made fruitless the Latinos’ mobilization efforts but also acted against those Latinos who were becoming most politically active.”
Bonilla’s 23rd Congressional District was redrawn, and he lost to a Democrat. Just five years later, Latino voters flipped it back to Republican control; the seat was held most recently by GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales, who resigned last month.
Nina Perales, who argued that case at the Supreme Court, sees that district as an enduring testament to the power of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“A lot of the districts that we see in the map today were created to make sure that minority communities were not accidentally chopped up, and that minority communities could have a voice in some parts of the state,” Perales said. “In CD-23, when a majority of Latino voters support Gonzales, they get to elect Gonzales, and it’s irrelevant what Gonzales’ political party is.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2, raising the bar for voter dilution claims so high as to make the statute a “dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. Partisan gerrymandering, like the type used to try to keep Bonilla in power, is a defense against allegations of vote dilution, the conservative majority ruled. Under the new standard, plaintiffs will have to prove mapmakers intentionally set out to discriminate against voters on the basis of their race.
Even as it diminishes in power, the legacy of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is deeply woven into Texas’ political maps, reflected in districts carefully drawn to ensure voters of color could have a say. The landmark 1965 law also gave rise to a new generation of leaders, elected from Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. From that point on, both parties would have to look out for voters of color when drawing their maps — and if they didn’t, voters would have legal recourse.
Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, said his career has been “defined” by the Voting Rights Act. As a young Black state representative, he was elected in 2012 to a congressional district drawn to right what a court found to be a legislative wrong: Texas had divided communities of color in North Texas across multiple majority-white seats designed to elect Republicans. Fourteen years later, Veasey is now departing Congress after GOP lawmakers redrew the district out from under him last summer.
With Section 2 of the VRA now significantly weakened, it will be harder to make the legal case that this redraw had an improper racial, rather than partisan, intent.
The recent hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act created a disconcerting full circle moment for Veasey, who recalled that his district was originally drawn for Willow Park GOP Rep. Roger Williams. Under the new lines, Veasey noted, Williams “will end up representing my neighborhood after all.”
How Section 2 remade Texas’ maps
In 1965, when Texas’ favorite son, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he said the vote “is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”
The law included two pillars with significant implications for Texas — Section 2, which prohibits voter discrimination based on race, and Section 5, which requires jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to get preapproval from the Department of Justice for any voting changes, including new electoral maps.
Before the law went into effect, Texas had just two people of color in its congressional delegation — Reps. Henry Gonzalez of San Antonio and Kika De La Garza from the Rio Grande Valley, both of whom were Mexican-American. They each voted for the Voting Rights Act that would enable the ranks of Hispanic lawmakers to swell significantly.
In the 1970s, Barbara Jordan became the first Black member of Congress from Texas. As a state senator, Jordan helped draw the district she would soon be elected to, a seat that provides Black Houstonians the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice to this day. Three new representatives of color joined Texas’ congressional delegation in the 1980s. By the 1990s, there were 13 members of color who served at any point during the decade. With two more election cycles to go, the 2020s have already reached a peak of 22 members of color, some of whom have represented white-majority districts.
During her sophomore term, in 1975, Jordan got Texas added to the list of states that needed preclearance for its maps. In 1982, Congress reinforced the law with an amendment that said maps ran afoul of the law if they had the effect of diluting racial or ethnic groups’ vote, even if that wasn’t the intent. These new provisions, the second of which overruled a Supreme Court decision to the contrary, opened the floodgates to litigation against Texas’ maps, at every level of government.
In each decade since the law’s passage, at least one of Texas’ maps has been found to have violated the law, and courts have ordered at least one new district to be drawn. The maps drawn in 2021 and 2025 are still under active litigation.
In the 1980s, plaintiffs successfully sued over the congressional, state Senate and state House maps under the Voting Rights Act, compelling redraws of legislative seats that were found to have diluted Black and Hispanic voting strength through packing them into just a few districts in the state’s urban counties — and into a single district in South Texas. Through preclearance, the Department of Justice also ordered Texas to redraw districts that diluted Black and Hispanic voters’ strength. The effects of those redraws can still be seen in today’s maps.
“You had charges and claims against the South Texas district, because they were packed down against the border,” said Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and founder of the Lone Star Project who has been involved in Texas redistricting cases for decades. “That’s why now, you see South Texas districts running north and south instead of along the bottom. It’s because [of] the court rulings under the Voting Rights Act, that you couldn’t pack those districts down against the border.”
More subtle, but just as important, was the way the Voting Rights Act pushed Texas lawmakers to proactively consider voters of color when drawing their electoral maps, Perales said. In the 1990s, for example, the majority-Hispanic 28th and 29th Congressional Districts “were born out of an understanding that the state needed to comply with Section 2,” she said.
Having grasped that it would be better to comply on the front end than be hauled into court later, the Legislature used to bring MALDEF and other groups in around the decennial census to train legislators on how to draw maps that met the law’s requirements.
“Part of that legal training was always on the obligation to avoid discriminating against minority voters under Section 2 the Voting Rights Act,” she said. “The guidance was, don’t inadvertently chop up minority communities when you’re drawing lines, because even if it’s inadvertent, it could be a legal problem.”
In 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated preclearance for most jurisdictions, including Texas. The state immediately reinstated a voter ID law that had been caught up under Section 5. The decision also freed Texas’ 2011 electoral maps from preclearance, though some parts of the map were later redrawn over Section 2 violations.
“A pre-1965 posture”
The centerpiece of the court’s redrawn map was the new 33rd Congressional District, crafted to allow voters of color to elect their preferred candidate in fast-growing Dallas and Tarrant county. The new lines were later upheld after a trial, in which the court concluded that lawmakers had “acted at least in part with a racially discriminatory motive … with regard to the districts in DFW in particular.”
Veasey was a state representative planning to run for reelection — and on his way to see a pre-Thanksgiving movie with his family — when he got a call that changed his career.
“I heard, hey, they’re gonna draw a new map, and there’s probably going to be an opportunity for you to run,” Veasey said. “You’ve got to make up your mind quick over whether you’re going to do it.”
He ran, and won, giving him a chance to represent a district that was as diverse as the state of Texas — one that would last about a decade and a half before falling victim to the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting.
Several other congressional districts that were shaped by the Voting Rights Act were subsequently dismantled by Republicans last summer. Among them are Hispanic-opportunity districts in South Texas, such as the 28th District represented by Cuellar, who rebounded from his loss to Bonilla to become one of Texas’ longest-tenured members of Congress.
The VRA also helped create Houston’s 9th Congressional District, where more than four in five residents are Black or Hispanic.
Last summer, lawmakers redrew it to a “bare majority” — 50.3% Hispanic — as they did several other districts.
Early last week, the Supreme Court allowed that map to go into effect while a trial proceeds. Just two days later, the court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the results-based test that had been used for decades should be replaced with a new, higher bar that allows for an easier partisan defense.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said lower courts had applied Section 2 “in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.” Under the new framework Alito laid out in the decision, a Section 2 claim must prove that the state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”
Angle said Texas’ most recent rounds of redistricting demonstrate what a post-Section 2 future may look like.
“You’ve got a situation in which a state that’s over 60% people of color is only going to have somewhere between 20% and 30% of the districts where voters of color’s vote matters at all,” Angle said.
State Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from Plano, said the U.S. had a long history of vote suppression that made the Voting Rights Act necessary.
“But we’ve moved on from that, clearly, and I think people recognize minority voters are entitled to equal representation but not certain election outcomes,” Shaheen said. “It really is more of a colorblind society, and elections are very much driven now by principles and policies, and not so much on skin color.”
Shaheen is among several GOP lawmakers who say they hope Texas takes up redistricting anew during the 2027 legislative session, this time with a focus on the state House and Senate lines.
Perales agrees that the Voting Rights Act is not about specific electoral outcomes. But she disagrees that the country is ready to move on from ensuring racial and ethnic voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, regardless of political party or the ethnicity of the candidate.
“As much as Justice Alito wanted to make it seem like a case about partisanship, it isn’t,” she said. “It’s about dismantling something much more historic and much more deeply needed in our country, which is equal opportunity for everybody.”
For Veasey, the ruling was not a surprise. But now that his district has been chopped up and the VRA’s core provision has been kneecapped, the retiring congressman sees a bleak future for the representation of Black and brown voters.
“It’s going to go back to a pre-1965 posture,” he said. “We just won’t have nearly as many voices pushing. It’s just be [like] when we had one or two voices that were pushing back before the VRA was passed — that’s what it’s going to be like now.
How the Voting Rights Act Reshaped Texas’ Electoral Maps was originally published by The Texas Tribune, shared by VoteBeat Texas, and is republished with permission.
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Why I Stopped Being Angry and Started Being Alert
May 27, 2026
Earlier this year I found myself doing something I'm not proud of: posting angry screeds on LinkedIn about the state of our democracy. The posts felt good to write. They changed nothing.
Then I noticed my feed filling up with similar posts from similarly frustrated professionals - lawyers, executives, consultants, educators - and it hit me: anger without organization is just noise. And noise doesn't move people.
So I took a deep breath and asked myself: what was I actually trying to accomplish?
The answer was clear. I believed that many of our business leaders were badly misjudging the level of concern among the people around them. Shielded by a professional culture that discourages political expression, they were interpreting silence as acceptance. And that silence, our silence, was making it easier for them to look away as democratic norms eroded around us.
The problem wasn't that professionals didn't care. It was that we had no appropriate way to show it.
I thought about the millions of Americans who had shown up at rallies to express their concern. That kind of visible, organized expression of shared values is how norms shift and how leaders are moved to act. But rallies don't speak the language of the professional class; LinkedIn does. And yet LinkedIn, the one platform where business and civic leaders actually pay attention, remained oddly quiet.
So a small group of like-minded professionals and I built something.
It's called We Are Alert. The initiative asks professionals to do one thing: add a WeAreAlert.org frame to their LinkedIn profile photo. No petition. No donation. No party affiliation. Just a visible signal, in the most professional context we inhabit, that we are paying attention.
The hardest part of building it wasn't technical. It was figuring out how to create something genuinely non-partisan in this uniquely polarized moment in American history.
I'll be transparent: our founding group’s political views are mostly left of center. We say that openly because we believe these principles belong to everyone, and because an initiative like this only means something if it grows beyond the people who started it. The We Are Alert statement takes deliberate care to avoid targeting any party, policy, or leader. We are not here to fight a partisan battle. We are here because democratic norms - honest leadership, equal application of the law, the peaceful transfer of power - are not liberal or conservative values. They are the foundation on which our democracy and prosperity are built.
The theory behind We Are Alert is simple: when enough professionals make their values visible in the spaces where their leaders actually pay attention, it shifts norms. The #MeToo movement showed what happens when silence breaks in professional spaces. The Business Roundtable's 2019 statement on stakeholder capitalism showed that when enough business leaders signal a shift in values, it changes the conversation. Visible, organized professional expression matters.
We are not naive about what a LinkedIn frame can and cannot do. It will not by itself restore democratic norms. But it can help break the silence that makes those norms easier to erode. It can signal to business and civic leaders that their employees, colleagues, constituents, and peers are paying attention. And it can create the kind of visible clustering that makes the concern impossible to ignore.
That is the modest but meaningful ambition of We Are Alert.
We launched last week at wearealert.org. The response so far has been what you'd expect from any early-stage civic initiative: a small but growing group of professionals willing to make their concern visible, and a much larger group who are interested but hesitating.
That hesitation is itself worth examining. It reflects something real about the professional culture we've built: one that has so thoroughly separated work from civic life that even the most basic expression of civic concern feels risky. We have normalized a silence that serves no one except those who benefit from it.
Democratic norms are not self-enforcing. They depend on enough people being willing to defend them: visibly, consistently, and in the spaces where it counts.
We are professionals from across the political spectrum who believe those norms are under serious threat. We choose not to be silent.
Stand with us. Be alert.
Gary Forman is a retired speechwriter, communications consultant, and creative director based in New York. He is a cofounder (with Lin Shearer) of We Are Alert, a non-partisan civic visibility initiative for professionals at wearealert.org.
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Audience members listen as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the Coosa Steel Corporation on February 19, 2026 in Rome, Georgia.
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Heil Trump!
May 27, 2026
Stop. I am not implying that Trump is the equivalent of Hitler. As I have said in two previous posts suggesting an analogy between Hitler and Trump, while Trump has an evil streak, he is not even close to being as evil as Hitler (see "The Hitler-Trump Analogy" and "Another Hitler-Trump Analogy"). However, Trump has characteristics, and his supporters have characteristics, in common with Hitler and his followers.
Trump is a megalomaniac; his self-aggrandizement knows no bounds. See my article, "Trump - Poster Child of a Megalomaniac." Trump clearly thinks of himself as a man who can do no wrong, the brightest person in the world, a king, a master of the universe. There are no rules that apply to him. As he said in a New York Times interview, "My own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."
He has taken this country to war without consulting or getting authorization from Congress, disrupting not just America's economy and causing price increases, but disrupting economies around the world. And when asked whether he has considered the impact of the war on the prices people have to pay, on Americans' finances, his response was "not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans' financial situation."
Trump demands total obeisance from everyone around him. Trump will brook no disagreement with him or failure to follow his orders. And because he has made clear what will happen to you if you do cross him, just about everyone—whether in the Executive Branch or Republicans in Congress, and even many judges that Trump appointed—bends his knee and does Trump's bidding. Clearly, almost everyone fears Trump's wrath.
Trump destroys his enemies. Depending on whether you are a disloyal Republican or a Democrat, Trump's retribution differs. If you are a disloyal member of Congress, he will encourage a primary challenge to you and endorse your opponent. If you are a government official, he will fire you; that you attempted to follow his orders but came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work—such as DOJ attorneys who can't get an indictment or think the case is not warranted—does not lessen Trump's anger.
If you are a Democrat who has been a thorn in his side or has in the past been involved in efforts to discredit or punish him, he will order the DOJ to find some reason for indicting you.
Trump is a racist. I am not using the term as it is generally used in the United States, to indicate that someone is biased against Blacks. Trump's racism is broader—he is biased against everyone who is not White. Whether Mexican, Haitian, Muslim, or from other "shit-hole" countries (his term), Trump has used a stream of vitriol to degrade immigrants from such countries/areas, referring to them as rapists, criminals, drug dealers, among other things. As for Blacks, he has referred to them as lazy, stupid, or low I.Q.
To Trump supporters, he can do no wrong. Despite all these negative characteristics of Trump, and despite his actions having worsened their financial situation by causing the prices they pay for everyday food and supplies to increase and his not bringing back their jobs, as he promised, Trump supporters—not just his hard-core base, but Republicans in general—continue to support him.
While the latest New York Times/Sienna poll shows him to be at his lowest approval rating ever—75% of independents and virtually all Democrats now disapprove of his performance—he continues to draw solid support from Republicans. It appears that nothing he does will weaken their support for him; they are like members of a cult.
So even as he causes havoc in the United States and around the world, even as his policies have worsened the' economic plight of America's blue-collar middle class and poor—whether White or people of color—he is worshipped by the average Republican voter and either worshipped or feared by the average Republican elected official or government employee.
They are almost fanatical in their support of him. So the title of this article, "Heil Trump," is not inappropriate. He is, in the minds of most Republican voters, "der Führer," the exalted leader.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
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Oregon Pioneered Vote-by-Mail. Its Ballot Access Laws Are Still in the Covered Wagon Era.
May 27, 2026
Oregon's primary election was on May 19. Neither of the two major-party candidates in Oregon's 6th Congressional District faced a primary opponent. They'll automatically advance to November's general election ballot, without a single voter really needing to weigh in, without collecting a single petition signature, and without knocking on a single door. The Democratic incumbent represents a party that accounts for 29.75 percent of registered voters in this district. The Republican nominee represents a party with 24.78 percent of the vote. Together, the two parties represent a minority of OR-6's electorate, and both of their candidates are already on the November ballot.
I represent the largest voting bloc in this district. Nearly 40 percent of OR-6's registered voters are unaffiliated, more than either party. These voters have never had a candidate who answers only to them—not to party bosses, party lines, or special interests. I am trying to be that candidate. And I am still on the porch, clipboard in hand, collecting the 5,500 hand-signed paper petitions I will need just to guarantee that my name appears beside theirs in November.
This is the same Oregon that has been a national pioneer in election innovation for over four decades. Oregon approved all-mail voting by a nearly 70 percent margin in 1998. In 2000, it became the first state in the nation to conduct a presidential general election entirely by mail. In 2019, it became the first state to offer free return postage on ballots. Oregon did not stumble into these reforms. Its voters demanded them, its officials championed them, and the rest of the country eventually followed. Oregon's election infrastructure is, by any reasonable measure, among the most forward-thinking in the United States.
And yet: to place an independent candidate on the congressional ballot in Oregon in 2026, you need a pen, paper, a clipboard, and someone willing to open their front door.
Consider that Oregon and the rest of the country already use digital identity verification for highly sensitive matters. Things like opening a bank account, boarding a plane, accessing medical records, filing taxes, signing a lease, applying for a mortgage, and myriad other things. Some airline passengers now clear airport gates through facial recognition without ever showing a boarding pass. The list keeps growing every year. But to demonstrate that a citizen of Oregon wants a candidate on a congressional ballot, you need a pen, paper, and someone willing to open the front door.
The signature requirement is a relic. The world it was designed for no longer exists. And the physical reality of meeting it has become dramatically harder, because the spaces where you could once gather signatures efficiently have largely been closed off.
In an earlier era, the public square was literal, a place where people gathered, where civic life happened in person, where a candidate or a cause could meet voters where they actually were. That square is now digital. It is social media, email, text messages, and online communities. That is where people interact, share information, and engage with the world around them. I can reach a voter online, capture their interest, and have them tell me they want to sign my petition in just a few seconds. But then I have to send someone to their door with a clipboard, because the law requires a physical signature on a Secretary of State-approved form, with hand-printed name, date, and address, including ZIP code, in the space provided, in apparently subjectively legible handwriting, or the signature will not count. The interest was digital, yet the follow-through regressed to analog. We make a U-turn from the 21st century back to the 19th every time we try to collect a valid signature.
Those forms, by the way, are not designed with generosity. The space allotted for each required element is tight enough that missing even one field, or having a single element ruled illegible by the Secretary of State's office, invalidates that signature entirely. The nominal requirement for OR-6 is 3,532 valid signatures from registered voters in the district. In practice, accounting for the inevitable invalids, I need to collect between 5,000 and 5,500 total signatures to be confident of clearing the threshold. And while the certification deadline is August 25, the Secretary of State's office recommends submitting well in advance to allow time for manual review and validation, without specifying how far in advance. We are left to guess.
That lead time and those people-hours of manual review could be eliminated almost entirely by digital identity verification. The same technology that confirms who you are before you board a flight could confirm who you are before you sign a petition. Oregon, of all states, would know how to implement it. Oregon has been implementing election innovation since before most of the country believed it was possible.
The places where you could once gather signatures in volume are also largely inaccessible. Grocery stores, shopping malls, big-box retailers: all privately owned, all within their rights to remove you, and most of them will. I can speak to this from personal experience. What remains is door-to-door canvassing, and in 2026, that means contending with 'No Soliciting' signs on a substantial share of front doors, Ring and Nest cameras on most of the rest, and a reasonable reluctance among most people to open their door to a stranger. The legal mechanism for putting an independent candidate on the ballot now depends almost entirely on strangers opening doors to strangers, at a moment in history when almost nobody does.
None of this is accidental. Ballot access laws were written by the two major parties and serve the two major parties. The barrier to entry is not a neutral inconvenience. It is a structural moat maintained by the same political establishment that benefits from keeping it in place. Professional petition circulator firms exist to solve this problem, and they work, but given an average collection rate of around 12 signatures per hour at a base rate of $20 per hour plus per-signature bonuses, the cost to simply become an option on a ballot for this race runs between $13,000 and $15,000. A party-backed candidate has the party's infrastructure. An incumbent doesn't need to gather signatures at all. The barrier falls hardest on the one category of candidate the system most needs and least wants: the credible, well-qualified political outsider.
Ballot access is only one layer. Campaign finance rules, debate access criteria, media coverage patterns, and electoral infrastructure were all shaped by people with strong incentives to make the system resistant to disruption. Major-party candidates benefit from party fundraising infrastructure, coordinated spending, and institutional name recognition. Independent candidates start with none of that. Oregon's primary was on May 19, but because I am not a party candidate, it was irrelevant to my campaign. I do not get the earned media that comes with a contested primary, the donor energy, or the voter attention. Instead, I have been collecting signatures while the clock runs. My campaign's limited early resources are going toward ballot access rather than voter outreach, advertising, or organizing. The compressed timeline that results, Oregon's primary is among the latest in the country, which means the window between the primary and the general is shorter than almost anywhere else, making an already steep climb even steeper.
There is also a quieter problem, and it may be the most consequential one. For years, conventional wisdom has held that voting for an independent is throwing your vote away. That assumption has shaped behavior at every level: how the media covers independent candidates, how donors evaluate them, how voters think about their own choices. What most voters do not know, because the two major parties have no interest in telling them, is that the electorate has been moving steadily away from both parties for years. Nationally and in Oregon, voters have been registering as unaffiliated in growing numbers, election cycle after election cycle, as the major parties have grown more extreme, more gridlocked, and more loyal to their own institutional survival than to the people they were elected to serve. In OR-6, that trend has produced an electorate in which unaffiliated voters are the largest bloc. The math has already changed. The conventional wisdom has not caught up.
When I gather signatures and talk to voters about these numbers, that independent voters are nearly 40 percent of this district, more than either party, I watch something shift. People did not know. They assumed they were the exception, the outlier, the lone dissenter. Finding out they are the majority changes the calculation entirely. If independent voters in OR-6 vote as a bloc for a candidate who actually represents them, the independent candidate wins. The math works. What has been missing is a candidate worth coalescing around.
My opponent raised $3.3 million in her last campaign. Ninety-three percent came from outside the district she represents. Nearly sixty percent came from outside Oregon altogether, from national PACs, financial industry donors, and D.C. lobbying organizations, some of them foreign government-backed. Her voting record reflects the priorities of national Democratic leadership, not the politically diverse district she represents. She had no difficulty getting on the ballot. She did not need to.
I am a combat veteran with nearly 27 years of military service and a Bronze Star. I am a healthcare executive and a professor at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. I founded a nonprofit that helped bring more than 150 Iraqi and Afghan interpreters to safety after their service alongside American forces, a work commended on the floor of the United States Senate by both a Republican and a Democratic senator. I have never held elected office. I have never answered a party caucus. Not a single member of Oregon's current congressional delegation has served in the military. I would be the only one.
People ask why qualified outsiders don't run for Congress. The answer is that the system is not designed to let them through. Ballot access, fundraising requirements, media infrastructure, debate rules: each layer filters candidates with party backing and donor networks, while filtering out almost everyone else. This is not an incidental outcome. The rules were written by people who benefit from keeping outsiders out.
Oregon's 6th is a test case. If the largest voting bloc in this district, voters who are already tired of choosing between two parties they don't trust, can find out that a genuinely strong independent candidate exists and decide to vote for their actual interests, something changes. Not just here. The math supports it. Whether the system allows them to find out in time is a different question.
For now, I'm on a porch with a clipboard, waiting for someone to answer the door — literally.
Jason Faler is a combat veteran, Bronze Star recipient, healthcare executive, and professor at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. He is running as an independent candidate for Oregon's 6th Congressional District in November 2026. Learn more at FalerForCongress.com.
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