Hi all,

Hey, it’s May! Here’s a preview of this week’s newsletter:

Redistricting is, as the kids say, popping off after the Supreme Court’s big decision this week.
A Wisconsin clerk has an unusually strict standard for absentee ballots, leading to lots of rejected ballots.
Louisiana is postponing its primary election, but only for U.S. House races.

If you love redistricting, boy, was it the week for you.

The Florida Legislature convened in a special session to pass a new congressional map that could net Republicans up to four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. And on Wednesday morning, literally as legislators were debating the map in Tallahassee, the U.S. Supreme Court defanged Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, a long-anticipated decision that could inspire several other states to join the redistricting fray.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, had cited the looming decision in Callais as a reason that Florida’s congressional map needed to be redrawn. But the maneuver is widely understood to be part of the nationwide epidemic of mid-decade redistricting that started last summer. To shore up Republicans’ chances of holding the House in the midterms, President Donald Trump urged Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina to draw new congressional maps that created more safe seats for Republicans. In retaliation, Democrats in California and Virginia successfully passed ballot measures that instituted Democratic gerrymanders of their own.

Once DeSantis officially signs the map, Florida will become the sixth state to voluntarily enact a new congressional map this cycle, and the eighth state overall. (Ohio and Utah also got new congressional maps this cycle for unrelated reasons.) Both of those numbers are modern records for election cycles not immediately following a census (when redistricting normally takes place).

The losers of this cartographical arms race have been the voters. There’s no set definition of what makes a political map gerrymandered, but one measure of a map’s partisan bias is a statistic called efficiency gap, or the difference between how many votes the map “wastes” for one party versus the other. (Any vote cast for the losing party in a district, or cast for the winning party after it already won a majority, is considered wasted.)

An ideal efficiency gap is 0, meaning the number of wasted votes is perfectly balanced between the parties. But based on the results of the 2024 presidential election, all but one of the new maps has an efficiency gap of 20 percentage points or greater in favor of the party that drew it. And all but two got less fair.

The maps also have a lot fewer swing seats — meaning fewer competitive elections and a House that is less responsive to changes in voters’ preferences. In 2024, these eight states had 28 districts that voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris by 8 points or less. Under their new maps, though, they have just 13.

Ironically, the one thing mid-decade redistricting doesn’t seem to have done — at least, at this point — is give Republicans the upper hand they were looking for. When Trump kicked off the redistricting race, he likely didn’t anticipate that California and Virginia would be able to amend their state constitutions and implement such brutal Democratic gerrymanders, with the result that Democrats have actually been able to neutralize all of Republicans’ gains. According to redistricting expert Jonathan Cervas, who used past election results to estimate how the eight new maps would perform in a variety of political environments, the new maps actually produce an average net Democratic gain of 2.69 seats.

At least so far. Thanks to Louisiana v. Callais, we’re not quite done with 2025-26 redistricting. On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry announced that he was postponing the Pelican State’s May 16 primary for U.S. House contests — in which voting was already underway — in order to redraw Louisiana’s congressional districts to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. That should result in a net gain of at least one, and possibly two, seats for Republicans.

Trump also said Thursday he had talked to Gov. Bill Lee about redrawing Tennessee’s congressional lines to target the state’s lone Democratic representative. While redistricting this late in an election year would present hurdles for any state, they might be surmountable in Tennessee, whose primary isn’t until Aug. 6. (It would still have to reopen its candidate filing period, which closed on March 10.)

In addition, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to strike down its congressional map in light of the Callais decision and has called a special session to reschedule its May 19 primary if that happens. Republicans in South Carolina, including Gov. Henry McMaster, and Mississippi have also urged their legislatures to draw new lines. Each of those states has one Democratic-held seat that Republicans would like to eliminate.

Meanwhile, Gov. Brian Kemp has announced that Georgia won’t redraw its lines before the 2026 election, although it may do so for 2028.

Adding to the chaos, state courts could still block some of the new maps that have already taken effect. The Virginia Supreme Court is hearing a procedural challenge to the referendum that passed its new map. Voting-rights groups have vowed to sue over Florida’s new map once it’s official. And a lawsuit is ongoing over whether Missouri’s new map can go into effect before a ballot initiative challenging it qualifies for the ballot.

Basically, we’ve entered a world where redistricting isn’t a once-in-a-decade occurrence — it’s all around us, all at once. If you don’t love redistricting, well, it might be time to get used to it.