Iowa keeping partisanship off the map

Voters Not Politicians (VPN) is a grassroots initiative that, with the help over 4,000 volunteers who knocked on 125,000 doors and canvassed at public events, collected the 400,000 signatures needed to get an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the statewide ballot. The initiative passed with 61% of the vote in 2018 and requires district boundaries be drawn by average citizens. The group’s founder also started The People, another group to help residents in other states apply VPNs model to stop gerrymandering. So far, residents in Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire are at various stages of applying the model.

Ohio is among 11 states where voters are challenging newly-drawn political maps using algorithmic redistricting, a process that produces thousands of simulations to help show which of the potential maps are outliers and may be the result of gerrymandering. Based on this algorithmic evidence, an Ohio court ordered the state's redistricting commission to go back to the drawing board and come up with a fairer map.

Voters Not Politicians is a grassroots initiative that, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, ran a successful campaign to defeat gerrymandering in Michigan. The state has a citizen-led ballot initiative option, so the group held townhall meetings and gathered over 410,000 voter signatures to get the initiative on the statewide ballot. The measure was challenged in courts, but the group raised funds for legal help and the initiative passed by a margin of 61-39 percent. The new law requires that an independent group of average citizens will decide district boundaries with full transparency.

Gerrymandered Congressional districts, drawn using evermore individualized voter data, are set up to tip elections across the United States. Lawmakers and voting advocates are pushing back and creating new methods of making the maps. From independent commissions to constitutional amendments, here’s what’s happening in California, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, South Dakota and Utah.

Low voter turnouts, populists offering half-truths, corporate interests, and the blurring of facts in the media are signs that democracy around the world is in turmoil. Internationally, citizens have assembled different programs and initiatives that arm ordinary people with information about policy and their elected officials, as well as distinctive ways to reform the electoral system.

The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies provides a "blueprint" for peaceful and democratic revolution, busting myths about the process of nonviolent revolt and helping dissidents in countries around the world to accomplish political goals, such as fighting corruption or protecting the environment.

In its efforts to oust authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Tisza Party established “Tisza Islands” across the country to recruit and engage volunteers, with more than 20,000 members as of January 2025. Through these outposts, the party was able to staff its campaign stalls with volunteers, distribute an independent newspaper highlighting information not reported in pro-Orbán media, and deploy election monitors to polling stations on election day. Tisza’s candidate, Péter Magyar, defeated Orbán with more than 53 percent of the vote.

After Michigan updated laws surrounding the processing of absentee ballots, local clerks were able to begin opening, verifying, and scanning absentee ballots up to eight days before the state’s August primary, depending on the size of the city or town. In Detroit, election staff were able to report 80% of the absentee ballot results by 10:30 p.m. on election day, as opposed to the next morning, which clerks say helps avoid public concerns about election security.

To assuage concerns around election security, Ada County, Ohio created an online tool called Ballot Verifier that allows users to search every ballot cast in the county since 2022. County officials invited local election skeptics to be the first to test the new tool and received positive feedback on its level of transparency.

After Alaska and Maine implemented ranked-choice voting, which allows citizens to rank candidates in the order of their preference, voters reported feeling more engaged in the process and noticing less extreme rhetoric among politicians running for office. Despite efforts to repeal the system on the basis that it is confusing, about 70 percent of voters ranked more than one candidate on their ballot.