How Does Late-Cycle Redistricting Affect Election Officials and Voters?

Redistricting typically happens at the start of each decade. But in the last year, there has been an unprecedented flood of mid-decade redistricting, with 10 states adopting new congressional maps.

This kind of mid-cycle redrawing is not entirely new; court orders have long required states to revise maps between decennial rounds. What is new is the recent wave of voluntary mid-decade redistricting.

Each new map is a policy choice made by state legislators (or voters, in ballot referendums). But the work of interpreting that map and sending voters the right ballots falls to state and local election officials. When states redraw maps mid-decade, election officials face rushed timelines that raise the risk of errors, unexpected costs that strain local budgets, and voter confusion. Policymakers can mitigate these risks by giving election officials as much lead time as possible and additional resources to implement any changes.

Rushed Timelines Raise the Risk of Errors

The underlying work of redistricting is intricate and extensive. When a new map is adopted, election officials must ensure that all voters are assigned to the appropriate districts so that they receive the right ballot. That sounds simple, but voters don’t just belong to one district. A single address can fall inside dozens of overlapping jurisdictions at once: congressional, state legislative, county, school, fire, utility, and more.

As the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Local Election Officials’ Guide to Redistricting puts it, “Federal, state, local, and district boundaries rarely coincide with each other and often have overlapping dividing lines.” Those lines routinely bisect apartment complexes, dormitories, and congregate-care facilities, so officials often verify district assignments voter by voter.

How offices do the underlying address work varies. Many use geographic information systems (GIS) to locate addresses and assign them to the new districts automatically. Others maintain street segment files, or lists of address ranges (say, 100, 300 Maple Street) mapped to the districts they fall within. Either way, the steps tend to run in a fixed order: confirm or redraw precincts, reassign affected voters by address, then design and proof new ballots. Because each step depends on the one before it, a delay at any step pushes everything else back. On the normal decennial schedule, this work takes months. Mid-decade redistricting forces officials to do it again, at a much faster pace, under legal uncertainty, and often without sufficient warning.

Carrying out this complex work under time pressure and perhaps with fewer veteran election officials on staff, means that errors may slip through the cracks. And when they do, the cost is real. “Errors show up when a potential candidate wants to run for office and discovers they are assigned to the wrong district,” says Kim Brace, president of Election Data Services, a firm specializing in redistricting and election administration.

And an error is rarely isolated: Because different kinds of districts intersect, a single miscoded street segment can place dozens of voters in the wrong set of races at once, congressional, legislative, and local alike.

Voters bear it too: In 2023 in Lucas County, Ohio, 61 voters received the wrong ballot because of a voter-file error. Officials caught it before voting ended and issued affected absentee voters supplemental ballots they could return through Election Day, but not every error is caught in time. In 2017 in Newport News, Virginia, over two dozen voters may have been given the wrong ballots, an error that might have affected which party controlled the House of Delegates.

A map adopted mid-decade can require officials to compress what is typically months of work into weeks or days. “This places great stress on election staff to complete critical work, foundational to the success of an election, in a very abbreviated manner, often with litigation creating even more doubt,” says Mark Earley, supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida. “This greatly increases the likelihood of errors.”

New maps are usually challenged in court, every state that adopted voluntary mid-decade maps in the past year has faced at least one challenge, and litigation increases the time pressure further. Every week spent waiting on a court is a week not spent on the exacting work that good election administration requires. And because each step depends on the last, time lost at the start cannot be recovered later; it simply compresses the final steps to check that ballots are correct before they are provided to voters.

Local Jurisdictions Bear the Cost

Redrawing maps mid-decade costs money, and most of it falls on local jurisdictions whose budgets were set long in advance. The change is “likely to impact budgets that were likely planned a year or more in advance, with no expectation of costs factored in,” Earley says. Those costs can include temporary staff to redo precinct maps, reassign voters, and redesign ballots.

Printing is another expense, typically borne locally. Because offices usually hold printing until shortly before the federal 45-day deadline for sending ballots to military and overseas voters under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a map finalized late can force reprints. If absentee ballots have already been mailed, replacements add postage, and voter confusion. Some states must also reissue voter registration cards, adding still more printing and mailing. On top of all this, officials often have to revise voter-education efforts to explain the changes, which takes staff time the budget never anticipated. And these are not always one-time costs: when a map is (inevitably) contested, a jurisdiction can be forced to redo outreach, or reprint ballots, more than once as deadlines move.

Voters May be Confused and Mistrustful

Every redistricting reassigns voters to new districts, and with them, new candidates to vote for. Voters who have followed, or formed opinions about, their representative will feel that discontinuity most, and many are surprised, even angered, not to find the incumbent or race they expected on the ballot. Officials work to spread the word, but doing so on a compressed timeline is hard. States often require formal notice when a voter’s district, precinct, or polling place changes. “Redistricting affects all three of these,” Earley says. “Unexpected redistricting often makes it difficult to accomplish these required mailings on time.”

That matters because confusion erodes trust. Research highlighted by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab finds that voters’ personal experiences shape their broader confidence in elections. In a period of heightened distrust, a voter who encounters something unexpected on their ballot, a missing race, a different polling place, a representative they have never heard of, has no easy way to tell a routine boundary change from a genuine mistake, and many will assume the worst.

What Policymakers Can Do

Mid-decade redistricting is a choice, and its costs to election officials and voters are not inevitable. Policymakers who pursue it can limit the damage by doing three things:

Building in enough lead time for officials to complete the work accurately and check it.

Ensuring local offices have the resources to cover reassigning voters, reprinting ballots, and voter outreach.

Coordinating early with the election officials who understand best what a new map will require.

Officials can also prepare regardless of whether new maps come. Brace recommends that jurisdictions engage now with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Block Boundary Suggestion Program, which helps align election and census geographies, and audit their voter rolls against those geographies, work that Brace admits is not easy. Either way, accuracy and public confidence are far cheaper to protect up front than to rebuild after the fact.

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