"Why and Why Not" podcast host Brad Fallon welcomes guest Dr. Stephen Medvic, Author of Gerrymandering: The Politics of Redistricting in the United States, for an in-depth look at gerrymandering.
This funny-sounding word gets scorn from both major political parties, yet we have more gerrymandered maps than ever. So how'd we get here and what could we do about it?
Gerrymandering (Not as fun as it is to say) - Why and Why Not
Brenda Núñez, voter registration supervisor for Nueces County, shows the home screen of the state's voter registration system in 2024. Election officials say they're still struggling to use the system, known as TEAM, to complete essential tasks.
At 6 p.m. a few days after the state sent Randall County election administrator Shannon Lackey a backlog of 3,388 of voter registration records, she was still at her desk, processing them after a full day of work.
She planned to stay late and get as much done as she could, then keep working from home. Lackey, whose department has five employees, isn’t expecting overtime pay or compensatory time off to make up for the extra work caused by the state error.
The most frustrating part, she said, was that the state’s voter registration and management system, known as TEAM, was making it harder to get through the backlog.
“I just got a message saying ‘an error occurred’,” Lackey said while on the phone with a Votebeat reporter. “I cannot tell you how many times I get that message, ‘an error occurred,’ so I’m just clicking. Nothing’s happening. I can’t work right now.”
She said her only choice is to push through.
“I have to get this done” she said, but “how are we going to fix it? And if it’s not fixable, where do we go from here? Because this is unacceptable.”
Local election officials across the state have raised concerns about TEAM since the state rolled out a long-awaited upgrade more than a year ago. Now they must use the system to resolve a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records and updates state officials sent them due to a software error with the Texas Department of Public Safety web portal. Many say the issues with TEAM are making the backlog harder to resolve at a critical time.
State officials discovered the error just weeks before today’s deadline for Texans to register to vote in time for the critical midterm elections. Election officials are already contending with the typical high volume of voter registration applications delivered in person and by mail at the last minute in the coming days.
Some better-resourced and larger county election departments have been able to quickly resolve their backlogs with help from outside vendors, but they’re also still reporting problems interacting with TEAM.
Election officials said it is still difficult to verify voters’ eligibility when processing voter registration applications, and process mail-in ballots in TEAM, among other tasks.
“Based on the direct experiences of county election officials across the state, it has become evident that these problems are the result of fundamental system architecture failures by the state’s voter registration database vendor, Civix,” the Texas Association of County Election Officials said in a statement last week.
With the election just weeks away, the state should “ensure the delivery and maintenance of reliable voter registration database software” before any further payments are made to Civix, which is based in Louisiana, the statement said.
Civix did not respond to a request for comment.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it’s offering counties grants to reimburse their costs to process the backlogged applications.
In an emailed statement, Alicia Pierce, the spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said the agency has communicated directly with counties about TEAM “on a continual basis.” Pierce said the agency conducted trainings throughout the state for the rollout and continues to offer webinars. “We send weekly emails with updates on production builds and development work, and we host monthly calls for counties to ask questions,” she wrote.
“Texas has had seven successful elections since the rollout of the newly developed TEAM,” she added. “Additional features addressing county concerns will be rolled out soon as we all prepare for the November election.”
The agency has resolved some functionality issues with TEAM and has improved it some since its July 2025 launch, election officials told Votebeat, but fixes often take months. In other cases, when one problem is resolved, another pops up.
Some voting rights advocates say local election officials have enough burdens without adding technological problems to the mix.
“If I had to log on to a system every day and have no idea if it was going to work today like it worked yesterday, I think I would lose my mind,” said Emily Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “But we are asking county officials to follow hundreds and hundreds of statutes in the Texas Election Code, keep ballots safe, protect the security of the elections, while not knowing how or if TEAM will work for them.”
In January 2024, at an annual gathering of election officials, the state showed an early video demonstration of new features the upgraded TEAM system would have. They said it would help election officials complete tasks more quickly and efficiently.
Hundreds of election officials clapped and cheered in excitement. They’d been waiting years for such upgrades.
But “those promises are still unmet,” Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and current president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said in an interview. “We’re not even at basic functionality, much less bells and whistles that had county election officials excited back then.”
Texas promised to pay Civix $17 million, and up to $36 million if the state renews the contract in October 2027, public records show. The secretary of state’s office said the cost is covered by a mix of state dollars and federal funds earmarked for improving election administration.
Officials in each of the state’s 254 counties interact with the TEAM system on a daily basis to conduct voter list maintenance and manage elections. Roughly 18 counties use state-approved outside vendors to manage their voter registration lists, but must still sync their data with TEAM daily and rely on TEAM for other essential functions.
Three local election officials told Votebeat they are struggling with verifying voters’ eligibility, a key step that must be done in TEAM.
That step confirms a voter’s name, date of birth, and partial Social Security number or driver’s license number matches state records, essentially ensuring that the registrant is who they say they are. It’s an automated process, and the majority of the time it works. But in some cases, election officials said they have waited weeks — up to 60 days — for that verification, and they aren’t sure why.
A long delay risks that the voter doesn’t show up on the rolls when they try to actually vote, said Michelle Allcon, the Smith County elections administrator.
“I can’t tell what that application is missing so we can fix it. It’s just stuck,” Allcon said. She said election administrators first flagged the problem in May. “Then those voters are calling me, asking ‘what’s going on? Why haven’t I gotten my voter registration certificate?’ And we look into it and see that there’s no action.”
Allcon, along with other election officials, said the secretary of state’s office typically confirms creation of an IT ticket to resolve the problem, but isn’t necessarily able to give a timeline for the fix.
Some election officials say they have come up with workarounds. Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County election administrator, said her staff has created a spreadsheet to track which mail ballots have been sent and received, as well as to sort them by voter ID number, name, and date, a feature that TEAM doesn’t have. In TEAM, her staff isn’t able to select a batch of mail-in ballot records at once to mark them as sent or received. Instead, they have to be updated one by one, which is time-consuming. The spreadsheet helps the elections team organize the ballots before marking them in the TEAM system. Her staff is keeping track of more than 1,800 mail ballots, Hancock said last week.
Although no technology rollout is ever perfect, other states have taken early steps to try and avoid problems later.
A 2024 report on four states that launched voter registration systems — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Rhode Island — emphasized involving local election officials, who it described as the main users of such systems, from the start.
But in Texas, local election officials say they had little input. Miles, Lackey, Hancock and others say their testing of the system occurred only a couple of months before the TEAM upgrade went live.
The counties that use outside vendors rely less heavily on TEAM, though they still must use it. But those vendors can be costly, while TEAM is free.
Dallas County’s election department uses an outside vendor. That’s how they were able to quickly get through a backlog of nearly 70,000 records sent to them after the DPS error, Elections Administrator Paul Adams said in an interview.
“There are other counties where either they don’t have that access to vendors or they have limited staff. So for some counties it’s going to be difficult, but everybody has contingency plans,” Adams said.
He said the main concern is what news of the backlog — and the state error that caused it — is doing to voters’ confidence.
“People are already concerned about the election; you start adding additional things onto it, and your voters are now concerned about the process,” he said.
Election Officials Are Scrambling To Process Voter Registration Backlog Using a System They Say Does Not Work was originally published by VoteBeat Texas and is republished with permission.
Presidents who lost the popular vote often faced economic turmoil. See the pattern from Harrison to Trump and how a 50-state strategy could change it.
While losing the popular vote does not inherently cause economic ruin, the structural political weakness of entering office without a democratic majority mandate often compounded the economic challenges their administrations faced. These terms were marked by distinct economic hardships, structural imbalances, or severe financial crises.
Destabilizing Partisan Protectionism
To compensate for a lack of broad popular support, some non-popular vote winners leaned heavily into aggressive, special-interest economic policies—such as hyper-protectionist tariffs—to satisfy the narrow geographic coalitions that elected them.
Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893): Harrison lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College by carrying key industrial states. To reward his base, Harrison championed the McKinley Tariff of 1890, which raised import duties to historic highs of nearly 50%.
The Fallout: The tariff triggered retaliatory trade measures, depleted the federal surplus via reckless spending, and severely strained the U.S. gold supply through the concurrent Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This volatile mixture directly triggered the Panic of 1893, one of the most devastating depressions in American history. The 1894 midterm elections ballot-box response delivered the largest incumbent-party reversal in U.S. history. Voters used the ballot box to punish the incumbent party, stripping them of 127 house seats, their remaining 93 seats represent a preservation of 42.27% of their peak 220-seat strength, and usuring in the Progressive Era (1890s to 1920s).
Deficit Expansion and Systemic Market Shocks
In the modern era, non-popular vote terms have aligned with massive shifts in wealth distribution, severe regulatory overhauls, and historic macroeconomic collapses.
George W. Bush (First Term: 2001–2005): Taking office after the razor-thin, contested 2000 election, Bush implemented sweeping tax cuts that primarily benefited high-income brackets. Combined with the subsequent dotcom bust and the immense, unbudgeted military expenditures of the post-9/11 wars, the structural fiscal health of the country inverted from a projected federal surplus to deep, compounding deficits. The deregulation favored during his broader tenure ultimately culminated in the subprime mortgage meltdown and the Great Recession of 2008.
Donald Trump (2017–2021): Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 through narrow victories in economically distressed manufacturing hubs, despite losing the popular vote. His economic agenda focused on aggressive trade protectionism (imposing sweeping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike) and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. While these moves initially catalyzed short-term stock market rallies, they severely expanded the national debt. His term ultimately concluded with the catastrophic structural and labor shocks of the COVID-19 economic crisis.
A comprehensive path forward addresses structural economic disparities caused by non-popular vote presidencies whose policy priorities often favor specific battleground regions, while concurrently building a 50-state voter engagement strategy and national economic cohesion.
Structural & Policy Interventions
To mitigate economic fragmentation driven by hyper-localized political pandering, policy must pivot toward universal economic baselines and state-level legislative innovation.
National Economic Anchors: Standardizing macro-economic baselines—such as indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation—insulates low-income workers from shifting federal executive agendas.
State-Level Campaign Finance Control: Utilizing state corporation-defining powers to enact a "Corporate Power Reset" targets and restrict dark money spending in federal and local elections without requiring federal constitutional amendments.
Regional Disparity Mitigation: Advocating localized infrastructure investments and modern workforce initiatives balances out "swing-state" subsidies, building resilience against economic anxiety in neglected markets.
A 50-State Electoral Engagement Strategy
Sustained national economic stability requires transforming the electorate from passive bystanders in "safe" states to active participants via comprehensive systemic reforms.
Structural Voting Reforms
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC): State legislatures can join the compact to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, guaranteeing the presidency to the candidate who secures the most votes nationwide. For more details, see: Virginia Joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact Puts the Finish Line in Sight
Pro-Voter Statutory Alignment: Transitioning states toward nonpartisan primaries or ranked-choice voting (RCV) alters candidate incentives, forcing them to appeal to a broader national demographic rather than a highly polarized base.
Rebuilding Civic Infrastructure
Universal Civics Education: Treating civic training as essential cultural infrastructure rectifying the civic empowerment gap between affluent and underserved voting districts.
Protecting Local Funding: Insulating local equity-based education grants from federal budgetary shifts prevents the weaponization of educational access based on partisan administrations.
Grassroots & Intermediary Engagement
Off-Cycle Organizing: Shifting the mobilization pipeline away from high-stakes October blitzes to year-round civic engagement maintains political literacy and voter retention.
Digital Peer Networks: Utilizing decentralized community spaces creates incremental touchpoints that boost political interest and lower the barrier to real-world ballot participation long before election day.
The Bottom Line
In a fifty-state presidential landscape, candidates could no longer rely on hyper-local pander or culturally isolated wedge issues. Instead, they would be forced to run macro-level campaigns addressing unaffordability, technological disruption of daily life, government accountability, and a reassessment of global commitments—issues that resonate uniformly across America's entire geographic layout.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
Independent voters may hand Democrats control of Congress this fall — but as history shows, they'll get nothing in return. Here's how to change that.
The midterms are six weeks away, and polls predict that independent voters, who broke for Donald Trump in 2024, are planning on voting for Democrats by wide margins. Among Latinos, the numbers are staggering, to the point that the Republican gerrymanders in Florida and Texas may actually result in Democratic victories.
If the Democrats take control of Congress, it will be because of independents. And what do independents get in return?
Almost nothing.
We do get to send a message, particularly to President Trump. We do get to create a divided government and restore some sense of balance (or at least stalemate) between the two warring parties. Just like in 2006, when independents gave control of Congress to the Democrats as a repudiation of George Bush’s war in Iraq, there is benefit to swinging the outcome and sending a message to the party in charge.
But it's not enough. Not when our country is struggling in so many ways. Not by a long shot.
America’s Independents are in a funny, almost absurd, position. We are the largest and fastest growing segment of the electorate - CNN has us at 48%. We decide the outcome of all major elections. If any other group of voters had these kind of numbers, and this capacity to decide outcomes, they would be courted by both parties. But not independents. We swing elections and then are ignored.
The day after the election, the Democrats will most likely break out the champagne. They will start congratulating their donors and interest groups. Independents won’t get a call. We won’t have our “what can we do for you?” moment.
In fairness, the Democrats and Republicans CAN’T ask that question. Why? Because the answer is that we want to change the political game. And that’s not something either party is eager to entertain.
Independents must take matters into our own hands. Neither party wants to make a deal with us. They want our votes, but they don’t want a partnership. So we have to apply the pressure - in many different ways. By pushing to end the partisan control of our primary system, of our election administration (including the office of Secretary of State), the Federal Election Commission, and the debates. By insisting that the media take us seriously. By running independent candidates and supporting pro-independent Democrats and Republicans. By defending the ballot initiative process - and more.
We have to apply tons of pressure on a decaying-but-powerful two party system. And we have to build the independent campaigns, candidacies, organizations, committees and coalitions that allow us to excel in the pressure business.
When 20 independent voters show up at a hearing in Annapolis, Maryland to testify in favor of Delegate Lily Qi’s bill to allow independents to vote in primaries, they are building and flexing political muscle and saying (without saying) “you want our votes so you can control Congress? Well we want something in return. We want in. We want to reshape the political conversation in this country so that it benefits ordinary people, not special interests. Let us in!”
When Seth Bodnar, the president of the University of Montana, says I want to serve the people of Montana, not be a cog in a partisan machine, so I’m running for US Senate as an independent” he is inviting Montantans to not just change who represents them, but HOW they are represented.
Our movement is growing. But the major parties are smart. They know that if independents ever got organized we could change the game in significant ways. So years ago they did something really smart to stop - or at least slow down - the growth of an independent movement. It was so small, and so elegant, that most people never noticed.
They invented the concept of the “leaner.”
Half the country is not on team red or blue. That’s a bad look for both parties, so they recruited smartypants political scientists to redefine these pesky nonconformists. The scientists eagerly created a genius (and highly unscientific) sleight of hand: “All these people identify as independent, but if they tend to favor one major party over the other, we can redefine them as Democrat Leaners or Republican leaners and presto - no more independents! Brilliant. And deadly.
The “independents as partisan leaners” framework is not just wrong, it is destructive on two levels. First, it obscures the fact that more and more Americans are distancing themselves from the major parties. There should be a national conversation about how to reshape our democracy to accommodate the changing desires of the American people. Instead, we get more partisan control, vitriol, and division.
Secondly, it paralyzes independents. It sends a message that independents are not a real thing. As such, you can’t do business with them. You can’t hammer out a deal. They may be 48%, but you don’t have to give them anything to win their votes. If independents were legitimized, they would have negotiating power. As “leaners,” we are impotent and unseen.
The key for the development of the independent movement is for independents to learn, through trial and error, how to shed the leaner label, apply pressure, and start extracting something for our votes. It will not be easy. Both parties are committed to gaslighting us. The journey from swinging outcomes to remaking politics is a tough one. But we independents need to learn how to do it. The country is depending on it.
John Opdycke is the president of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization.
A political scientist examines how automatic voter registration is quietly turning non-affiliation into America's largest voting bloc.
For most of my career as a political scientist, representation was the central theme of my teaching and research. Early on, I studied how legislators understood their responsibilities to constituents — whether they saw themselves as delegates carrying out constituent mandates, trustees exercising independent judgment, or politicos combining both. That work asked a question that still matters: What does it mean to represent the public in a changing democracy?
Today I find myself asking a related question: What happens when the electorate changes but the institutions built to represent it do not?
Across the country, voters registered with neither major party are becoming the largest single bloc in state after state. In Massachusetts, roughly two-thirds of registered voters are now "Unenrolled," up from just over half in 2020. In Alaska, more than 60% of voters are registered outside the two major parties. In Colorado, unaffiliated registration has passed the halfway mark. In Oregon, where I live, non-affiliated voters became the state's largest registration category years ago.
This is not simply a story about voters souring on parties. It's also, in part, a story about how states register people to vote.
Since Oregon passed the nation's first automatic voter registration law in 2015, roughly half of U.S. states and the District of Columbia have followed with some version of it. Eligible citizens who interact with the DMV are registered automatically unless they take a separate action to opt out or select a party. In "back-end" opt-out states like Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska, that separate action means filling out and mailing back a postcard — a step a great many people simply never take. The default in these states isn't "unregistered" or "pick a party." It's non-affiliated.
That's not the whole story. North Carolina has one of the largest non-affiliated blocs in the country without any automatic registration system at all, a reminder that plenty of voters are choosing independence on their own, not just defaulting into it. But where automatic registration and back-end opt-out do overlap, the mechanism is direct and measurable, and it's not a criticism of automatic registration itself, which has reliably increased registration rates, particularly among younger and lower-income voters who often fell through the cracks of the older opt-in system. It's an observation about consequences: when a state converts registration from something citizens must actively pursue into something that happens automatically, it also converts non-affiliation from an active choice into a passive default in a meaningful share of cases.
Those consequences show up first in primaries. In states with closed primaries, a rapidly growing share of the electorate is registered in a way that excludes it from choosing party nominees at all, which is a significant reason open-primary campaigns have gained traction in Oregon, Nevada, and elsewhere in recent years.
They also show up in redistricting, where the assumptions behind decades of reform were built for a different electorate. The modern redistricting toolkit — from the Supreme Court's "one person, one vote" line of cases to independent commissions and sophisticated fairness metrics — was developed almost entirely for a political world in which Democrats and Republicans defined the electorate. Districts are not created to represent political parties, though; they're created to represent people. When the largest single group of people in a jurisdiction isn't affiliated with either party, and when many local offices are formally nonpartisan, the two-party lens that redistricting reform was built around becomes a less complete description of who's actually being represented.
A few places are already experimenting with something different. Portland, Oregon, created an independent citizen commission — barred from including party officials or sitting politicians — to draw the city's new council districts, requiring broad supermajority approval and extensive public input before a map could be adopted. Michigan voters did something similar statewide in 2018, creating an independent citizens commission through ballot initiative that likewise bars sitting politicians and party officials from serving. California and Arizona have their own independent redistricting commissions, each built, in part, on the premise that districts drawn by elected officials answering to party organizations aren't the only, or necessarily the best, way to do this.
Not every state has kept pace. Rhode Island's non-affiliated voters are close to half its electorate, yet the state legislature still draws its district maps — a case of a state that modernized its front door to the ballot without modernizing who draws the lines behind it.
None of these experiments proves that independent commissions are the answer everywhere, or that traditional districting approaches have failed. What they demonstrate is more basic: institutions built for a two-party electorate can be redesigned when that electorate changes, and several states are already testing how.
That's worth taking seriously well beyond the states running the experiments. Nearly half the country has now adopted some version of automatic registration, and in the states where that design pairs with a back-end opt-out, it is structurally producing non-affiliated majorities or pluralities. This isn't a regional curiosity. It's a preview of where other states may be headed as more of them adopt similar systems.
None of this means political parties are disappearing, that primaries should be abolished, or that every state needs an independent commission. Those are separate, harder questions, each deserving its own debate. The more basic question comes first: if the electorate a state's institutions were built to represent has changed, should the state's understanding of representation change with it?
After a career spent studying how elected officials represent their constituents, I've come to think that's a question more states should be willing to ask — not because the old institutions have failed, but because every generation inherits institutions designed for an earlier electorate, and periodically it's worth checking whether they still fit the people they're meant to serve.
Kent C. Price is a political scientist and applied public opinion researcher living in Central Oregon. A retired professor from California State University, Bakersfield, he spent more than 30 years teaching voting behavior, elections, and democratic institutions. Over his career, he conducted extensive survey research and advised public agencies on governance, elections, and public policy. His early scholarship focused on theories of legislative representation, including “Instability in Representational Role Orientation in a State Legislature” (1985).
