After more than two decades working in elections, including four years as Virginia's top voting official, it takes a lot to surprise Chris Piper.
But the frenzied redistricting battle of the past few months — including a congressional map in his home state thrown out by a court after people voted to approve it, and certain elections postponed in Louisiana and Alabama after mail ballots already went out — has done it.
"I've never seen anything like it," said Piper.
Neither have voters, he worries.
"The biggest impact on voters is confusion," Piper said. "'Where do I go vote? Who is even my elected representative? Or, which district am I even in?'... There's the potential for them to not know who they're voting for."
Much of the focus of the ongoing redistricting war has been on which political party will come out on top in the race to control Congress.
But it's voters who will pay a cost, say voting experts and voting rights advocates, in the form of discarded votes, diminished voting power and a democratic process that is increasingly complicated to navigate.
"We're stuck in a zero-sum battle in which the parties are trying to maximize their power by manipulating the rules," said Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, a group that pushes for reforms to primary election systems. "The collateral damage is the everyday voter who just wants to have a say in who gets to represent them and to have the ability to hold them accountable."
What happened in Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia
President Trump set off the redistricting arms race last year, but it is recent legal rulings that have highlighted the changing election landscape for voters.
Two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority severely neutered the Voting Rights Act, and various Republican-led states in the South have since moved to draw more seats that favor the GOP.
The Supreme Court decision struck down a Louisiana congressional map, and the state's Republican governor, Jeff Landry, postponed voting for U.S. House primaries so state lawmakers could enact new district lines.
"Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters, Landry said in a statement.
His announcement came days before in-person early voting was set to begin — and well after absentee ballots were mailed to voters. Tens of thousands of absentee ballots had already been cast, and state officials sent notice to polling sites across the state that even though ballots would feature congressional races, those votes would not count.
"This is sort of entering this cautionary danger zone for us as I look at everything that's happened in the last two weeks," Sarah Whittington, advocacy director at the ACLU of Louisiana, told NPR. Her organization and others have filed legal challenges about the primary postponement.
Whittington said rules changing at the last minute, for explicitly political reasons, drives home a sense that many people already feel: that the system is rigged against them.
"What we are hearing over and over and over again is that your vote doesn't matter, your vote doesn't count. And we already know that that feels true in a lot of communities," Whittington said. "Right now, it's actually being reinforced by folks with authority and power to say, 'Your vote doesn't count. I'm not going to count that ballot.'"
This week, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to change its congressional map, in the wake of the Voting Rights Act decision, leading the state to announce different elections for different congressional districts.
Piper, the former election official, said the recent map changes also increase the chance of administrative errors, like a voter getting the wrong ballot, which can make invalidated votes more likely.
"[Local officials] are already taxed. They're already overburdened," Piper said. "When you throw these curveballs at them on a regular basis, it increases the likelihood that there will be errors."
In Virginia, the state's supreme court threw out maps that voters had approved, on the grounds that Democratic state lawmakers didn't follow the legislative process correctly.
The new maps would have given Democrats four more potential House seats, and were billed by the party as key to combatting Trump's redistricting push.
More than 3 million Virginians voted in the referendum, which drew millions of dollars in ad spending.
Chris Melody Fields Figueredo — the executive director of Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which helps progressive groups pass policy changes — criticized the Virginia court for overturning the will of the people.
"If you're a person in Virginia, or any other state, your question is going to be, 'Why is that OK here, but it is not OK here?'" she said. "That is, I think, the bigger risk that we have is, you know, having people lose faith in our government. People care about fairness."
Structural changes that exclude voters
Troiano, of Unite America, warns that this redistricting war amounts to "a race to the bottom" that will also leave most voters without meaningful representation in Congress.
In pursuit of more safe districts, communities and voting blocs are being further divided up, making it harder for them to organize.
It's also created a situation where there are even fewer competitive seats. Troiano said before this redistricting battle about 90% of congressional races were uncompetitive. That is up to about 93% now, he estimates.
Ultimately, this means that for the vast majority of U.S. House races, the general election will be decided before voters even get a ballot.
"I think the parties right now are operating as if our election system and our democracy belongs to them and we're mere pawns in a game that they play as far as who can win a mere majority of seats come November," he said. "In reality, this system belongs to the voters."
Karen Brinson Bell, the former chief election official of North Carolina, also noted that competitive races have been shown to drive turnout. A midterm year with fewer of them, at a time when people are questioning their faith in the process, could be a recipe for a disengaged public in 2026.
"Are [voters] going to show up or are they just sickened by the whole situation?" she said.
In Louisiana, Whittington of the ACLU says she's already hearing voters raise the same question, but she's trying to convince them to turn out and make their voices heard.
"We don't want folks to just sort of throw up their hands and say, 'It doesn't matter,' or, you know, 'They've effectively canceled my vote,'" she said. "And we're seeing it right now."
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