Which Political Party Really Wants Fair and Honest Elections?

Let’s look at actions, not words, and national legislation too, not just state level.

President Trump set off mid-census gerrymandering wars that Republicans are now losing. Perhaps Florida is in play to even the score.

At the state level, Democrats and Republicans have rigged political maps for years. The worst offenders are Illinois, California, and New Jersey.

10 Most Gerrymandered States

Independent Voter News discusses the The 10 Worst Gerrymandered States in the Country

1: North Carolina

Why: In 2024, Republicans won 50.86% of the statewide vote — highlighting that congressional makeup should be about 50-50.

Key Issue: After a state Supreme Court flipped from Democratic to Republican control in 2023, it overturned a previous ruling that struck down partisan gerrymanders, greenlighting new maps that maximized GOP control.

2: Maryland

Why: Maryland Democrats have long drawn congressional maps that crack Republican voters into multiple Democratic-leaning districts. Democrats won 62.62% of the statewide vote in 2024 — but hold all but one congressional seat (7 out of 8).

Key Issue: The 2022 map was so extreme that even a Democratic judge ordered it redrawn for being an “extreme gerrymander,” but in response to redistricting in Texas, Maryland Democrats may try to take the only seat held by a Republican.

3: South Carolina

Why: With Republicans controlling the General Assembly, they’ve had a free hand to maximize their advantage. Republicans won 58.23% of the statewide vote in 2024. However, they hold all but one of the state’s US House seats (6 of 7).

Key Issue: In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024), the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to SC-01, which civil rights groups said was redrawn to kick Black voters out in order to give Republicans a safe seat.

4: Illinois

Why: Illinois Democrats drew maps that consolidated power by eliminating Republican seats through strategic district collapses and splits. Democrats won 54.37% of the 2024 statewide vote but hold 82.35% of seats (14 of 17).

Key Issue: Several Republican strongholds were “cracked” or merged to reduce GOP representation. The 2022 map was criticized for having only one truly competitive seat out of 17.

5: Texas

Why: Even before the current mid-cycle redistricting controversy, Texas was considered one of the worst gerrymandered states. Despite consecutive election cycles of close contests between Republicans and Democrats, Republicans control 65% of U.S. House seats.

Key Issue: Adding 5 Republican seats would extend this majority to 79%, even as nonpartisan data shows that Republicans do not even make up a majority of voters anymore.

6: Wisconsin

Why: For over a decade, Wisconsin Republicans have entrenched themselves in the state legislature with maps that protect their super-majority in the legislature and in Congress despite a near-even split between the two major parties at the ballot box.

Republicans won 49.70% of the statewide vote in 2024 and hold 75% of U.S. House seats (6 of 8).

Key Issue: In 2018, Democrats won all statewide offices and 53% of the vote but only 36% of Assembly seats.

7: New York

Why: Democrats tried to push through a heavily gerrymandered map in 2022, which was struck down by the courts. A court-appointed special master drew more balanced maps.

Key Issue: Democrats may follow California’s lead and attempt another aggressive redraw for 2026. They currently hold 73% of seats, while they won 55.91% of the statewide vote in 2024.

8: Florida

Why: Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida scrapped bipartisan compromise maps and adopted a plan that dismantled a Black-opportunity district in North Florida.

Key Issue: Courts have ruled DeSantis’s map unconstitutional for racial discrimination, but enforcement has been delayed. The GOP-drawn map helped deliver 20 GOP House seats vs. 8 Democratic in 2022 (71.43%).

Republicans took 56% of the statewide vote in 2024. But the question is – will Florida join the mid-cycle redistricting battle?

9: Ohio

Why: Despite passing anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendments, Ohio Republicans drew maps that a bipartisan redistricting commission refused to make fair.

For example, Republicans took 55% of the vote in 2024 but hold two-thirds of U.S. House seats.

Key Issue: The state Supreme Court ruled 7 times that GOP-drawn maps were unconstitutional. Now, state lawmakers are considering new maps and some Republicans think the congressional map should be 12-3 in their favor.

10: Nevada

Why: Nevada is one of the rare examples of a party winning a majority in a statewide vote, despite only holding a quarter of the state’s congressional seats. Nevada is a competitive state due to its large independent voter population.

Key Issue: Republicans won 50.59% of the statewide vote in 2024, but hold only 25% of Nevada’s U.S. seats (1 of 4). Nevada was the only state in 2024 where the party that carried the state for president won a minority of House seats.

Each election delivers a near equal split between the parties — yet the congressional delegation is not divided 50-50.

That article was written on August 18, 2025. Virginia would now be in the top 10, perhaps number one.

For all the Republican screaming, it is not clear at the state level which side is worse.

What About National?

In 2017 Democrats proposed legislation to end gerrymandering. Republican killed that.

Then in 2021, Democrats introduced and passed legislation in the House including the Redistricting Reform Act of 2021 and various versions of the For the People Act.

The legislation aimed at banning partisan gerrymandering nationwide by requiring independent redistricting commissions in all states.

Key details regarding these legislative efforts include:

• Independent Commissions: The proposed bills required states to use independent, multi-party citizen commissions to draw congressional maps, rather than state legislatures.
• Mid-Decade Ban: Legislation aimed to prohibit states from remapping congressional districts mid-decade, a tactic used to gain partisan advantage.
• Outcome: These efforts passed the House but failed to pass the Senate due to lack of Republican support. 

Congressional Republicans had a chance to kill political gerrymandering but blocked it in 2017 and again in 2021.

This year, Trump demanded Texas remap Congressional districts mid-decade. Normally districts are remapped with census data.

The SAVE Act

President Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Utah Senator Mike Lee are spearheading the SAVE Act.

It’s presented as a fair elections measure. In reality it is a blatantly unconstitutional act that would give Trump ability to steal the election.

Republicans tout the act’s Voter ID provision as if that is all the bill does. Fortunately, even if it passed, the bill is so obviously unconstitutional, the Supreme Court would quickly kill it.

Save Act Background

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act is federal legislation that would amend the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to require individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship—such as a passport, birth certificate, or certain REAL ID-compliant documents—when registering to vote in federal elections.

States would be prohibited from accepting registration applications without this proof, and the bill includes provisions for alternative processes, voter roll purges, and penalties for non-compliance.

The act requires the voter ID to be the same as their birth certificate.

This places an extraordinary burden on women who would need a birth certificate and a marriage certificate to register to vote. Multiple divorces and remarriage is particularly problematic.

Three Reasons the Save Act Is Unconstitutional

1. Congress Lacks Authority to Impose Voter Qualifications.

The U.S. Constitution delegates the power to set voter qualifications—such as age, residency, and citizenship—to the states, with limited federal overrides via amendments (e.g., the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex, or age).

The SAVE Act’s proof-of-citizenship requirement effectively establishes a new national qualification for voting by mandating documentation that verifies citizenship status, which exceeds Congress’s role under the Elections Clause. This clause allows Congress to regulate procedural aspects like how elections are conducted, but not who is eligible to participate.

In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013), the Supreme Court struck down a similar state-level proof-of-citizenship requirement for federal elections, ruling it conflicted with the NVRA’s simpler attestation process.

By amending the NVRA to impose such a requirement nationwide, the SAVE Act is overreach.

2. Violation of the National Voter Registration Act and Supremacy Clause Issues

Although the SAVE Act seeks to amend the NVRA, it would conflict with the NVRA’s original intent to streamline registration and reduce barriers.

The NVRA requires only a sworn attestation of citizenship under penalty of perjury, and courts have invalidated stricter state measures as preempted by federal law.

Kansas’s similar proof-of-citizenship law, for instance, was ruled unconstitutional after blocking over 30,000 eligible voters.

The SAVE Act’s nationwide mandate could be seen as an end-run around these rulings, potentially violating the Supremacy Clause by forcing states to adopt federal standards that disrupt their own election administration without clear constitutional justification. This preemption of state processes, including online and mail-in registration, would impose unfunded burdens on local officials and expose them to legal risks, further straining the federal-state balance.

3. Undue Burden on the Fundamental Right to Vote

Voting is a fundamental right protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and laws imposing severe burdens must survive strict scrutiny—meaning they must be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest.

The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions of eligible citizens who lack easy access to required documents.

Estimates suggest 21 million Americans don’t have readily available proof of citizenship, with disproportionate impacts on women (due to name changes), low-income voters, rural residents, students, older adults, and minorities.

Requiring in-person submission and excluding common IDs like student or state-issued cards adds barriers, potentially amounting to a modern poll tax if obtaining documents incurs costs (violating the 24th Amendment).

Non-citizen voting is already illegal and exceedingly rare (e.g., audits in Georgia and elsewhere found negligible instances), so the Act’s burdens far outweigh any demonstrated need, failing constitutional tests under cases like Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983).

Federal Power Grab On Voting Still Flunks Basic Civics Test

CATO reports Federal Power Grab On Voting Still Flunks Basic Civics Test

The Framers greatly feared that a president or ruling national faction might someday gain power over the administration of elections. The Constitution guards against this danger by placing primary responsibility for elections with the states, subject to a rulemaking power that Congress has wisely used sparingly. The proposed SAVE Act, which passed the House yesterday, and the broader MEGA Act would impose rash, perhaps even unworkable, new rules while arming the president with dangerous new powers to harass and menace localities and officials whose decisions on election administration are not to his liking.

There’s nothing wrong with voter ID—most states use it, generally with good results. But the SAVE Act and MEGA Act have little to do with that issue. They are fueled by alarms about supposedly widespread noncitizen voting and voter impersonation that simply aren’t borne out by the evidence. Their new demands for documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) go beyond what almost any state has chosen to enact voluntarily and would impose serious burdens on both qualified citizen voters and administrators.

The bills expose local administrators to a risk of imprisonment if they fail to tick the right boxes even when no unqualified person in fact registers or votes. The new rules would take effect immediately, requiring states to set aside existing preparations for the 2026 elections and scramble to train staff and revamp data systems on the fly. They would abolish all-mail electoral systems that are popular out West, requiring many qualified, US-born voters to pay repeated visits to a distant county office if they hope to stay on the rolls. The acts give the federal government new powers of prosecution and discretionary regulation that would be highly susceptible to misuse, as well as empowering busybody or ideologically motivated private citizens to sue.

There’s more. The bill would force states to turn over voter rolls to these same federal overseers notwithstanding serious privacy concerns and the high chance of misuse. The broader MEGA Act even reaches out to ban the use of ranked-choice voting for federal races in states such as Alaska and Maine, even though there is zero evidence that such voting has caused any election integrity problems in those states. While election reform is most likely to endure when done with bipartisan support, the bills are, at this point, almost a purely partisan play.

For further discussion please see my March 4 post Three Reasons the Save Act Is Unconstitutional

The Save Act Is Dead

On March 15, I wrote The SAVE Act Dies this Week. Get Over It.

I am pleased to report, the SAVE Act Is Dead.

There Reasons the Save Act Is Dead

1. There is no majority to end the filibuster
2. A talking filibuster would fail
3. Even if by some miracle it passed, the Supreme Court would strike it

Five Republican Senators Against Ending the Filibuster

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune – “Ending the filibuster would be a “Grave Error”
• Kevin Cramer – Strongly Against
• Lisa Murkowski – Firmly Against
• Susan Collins – Firmly Against
• Roger Marshall – Generally Opposed

Senate Math

It takes 51 votes, not 50, to kill the filibuster. The Vice President has no role in this. That means three of the above five would have to change their minds.

There is zero chance of that.

Q: What about replacing Thune?
A: That was one of the more idiotic ideas that surfaced on X. Look at the above list and add a few more.

My assessment was then and is still correct. The only thing missing the the official coroner’s proclamation.

There are not enough votes in the Senate to pass the SAVE Act. There are not enough votes in the Senate to replace Thune as Senate Majority Leader. And there are not enough votes to end the Filibuster even if Thune was replaced as Senate Majority leader.

Current Status

• The bill has been set aside due to a lack of Democratic support to overcome the 60-vote threshold and a lack of appetite among some Republicans to change filibuster rules.
• Senator Lee acknowledged that passing the bill through the reconciliation process was “essentially impossible,” making its path forward challenging
• Yet, Senator Lee is still pressing ahead, hoping to revive a dead man.

The Polymarket odds of passage in March have expired. For April it’s 1 percent. For 2026 it’s hovering near 13 percent.

What the Save Act Is Really About

Voter Fraud Scorecard

• Utah: 1 registered, 0 voted, 2.1 million registered voters
• Idaho: 36 “likely”, voted uncertain, one million voters
• Louisiana: 390 noncitizen registrants, 79 of whom had voted in at least one election over the last several decades (out of 2.9 million registrants).
• Montana: 23 possible noncitizen registrants (out of approximately 785,000 people registered).
• Georgia: A 2024 audit found 20 registered noncitizens (out of 8.2 million registrations).
• Michigan: The Macomb County clerk, Anthony Forlini announced to great fanfare that he’d found 15 noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls of over 724,000 registered voters. The incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, investigated the 15 files. Three were U.S. citizens, four were previously removed from voter rolls, four were under further investigation and four do seem to be noncitizens.
• Arizona: In Maricopa County overseeing voter registration, there was a total of two possible instances of noncitizens voting out of some 2.5 million registered voters.

One of the alleged goals of the SAVE Act is to stop voter fraud. To prevent 100 or so confirmed instances, the bill would disenfranchise millions, and give the Trump administration ability to disenfranchise tens of millions more.

Also see Trump’s Voting Claims Are False. So What Is the Save Act Really About?

Post Synopsis

• While the Act aims to enhance election integrity, its unconstitutionality stems from encroaching on state powers, conflicting with established federal law, and erecting discriminatory barriers to voting.
• The purpose of the act is to disenfranchise women and minorities who tend to vote Democratic.
• The SAVE Act is not about “voter ID” or it would not be written the way that it was.
• If enacted, the Save Act would face immediate legal challenges, similar to prior state efforts. Courts would swiftly strike the act.

At the state level, it’s difficult to assess which political party is worse.

At the national level, things are crystal clear. Republicans, led by Trump, are fearful of getting clobbered in the Midterm elections.

Trump accuses the Democrats of stealing, but he is the one who wants to rig the election. Here’s a fun fact.

A “Blue Wave” Be in the Midterm Elections?

Yes. Huge. For discussion, please see How Big Will the “Blue Wave” Be in the Midterm Elections?

I expect Republicans will lose nearly every seat the consensus now labels as tossup.