The first half of 2026 has unfolded against a difficult backdrop for voting rights. Mid-census redistricting is now reshaping political boundaries at every level — not just congressional districts, but precincts, school boards, and municipal wards, where representation is often decided by the narrowest margins and where public scrutiny is thinnest. Layered on top, this year's Louisiana v. Callais decision further weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, narrowing the remedies available to communities challenging discriminatory maps. Against that backdrop, quantitative tools that make voting inequities visible — and defensible in court and before elected boards — matter more, not less.

We deepened our engagement with election officials and partners in the field this half. We returned to the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) conference for a second year, and made our debut at the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials (GAVREO) — a first foothold in a state whose counties we already serve. In collaboration with Fair Fight Action, VRC was also awarded a Vote Your Voice grant from the Tides Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center; the grant supports work in key African American counties in Georgia and will fund a significant expansion of our toolbox in the form of a new model that measures the marginal turnout effect of adding early voting locations. Where our existing tools quantify access, this new work will quantify what expanded access produces at the ballot box, closing the loop between what we can measure and what actually drives voter participation.

Our county-level work advanced on two fronts. In Bartow County, GA, our analysis supported changes to two polling locations and the addition of a third, improving overall voter access by more than 6% and African American access by 9%. In Monongalia County, WV, we are mapping the neighborhoods whose residents must travel excessive distances to reach their assigned polling locations, laying the groundwork for future access improvements. Alongside these engagements we invested in the infrastructure that makes VRC accessible to the counties who need us most. We rebuilt our website to better communicate our methodology and case work to election officials, advocacy partners, and funders, and we developed a population-based pricing model that finally makes VRC affordable to the vast majority of the country's rural and small counties — the jurisdictions most likely to be flying blind on access data, and least able to afford outside consultants. With redistricting active, the legal terrain shifting under Section 2, and a new turnout-effect model on the horizon, the demand for defensible, quantitative access analysis is only going to grow. We are grateful to our funders for making this work possible in a moment when it is both harder and more consequential.

The second half of 2025 positioned Voting Rights Code to be in a strong position for the election year in 2026. Notably, we have started applying our work to the redistricting discussion happening all over this country; we have expanded our name recognition in the academic, election administration and policy world; and rebranded to adapt to the new political atmosphere.

In August, Tarrant County, TX (home to Fort Worth) significantly reduced its number of polling locations as part of the state's redistricting effort. Within 24 hours of the ProPublica news story about this, Voting Rights Code had run an analysis of the demographic impact of the changes on the potential voter population of the county. We reached out to local officials, legal organizations and policy groups involved in responding to the decision. As a result, we are coauthoring a policy white paper with the League of United Latin American Citizens and Southern Poverty Law Center about the impacts of this decision.

Furthermore, Daphne Skipper presented our work at the NYU Math and Democracy Seminar Series. We have been invited to present a vendor table at GRAVEO in 2026, Georgia's State Election Official conference, and we will be at NASED again in 2026. We are in conversations with West Virginia to help them with their redistricting work in 2027. Their goal is to redraw all their precincts so that residents live within 30 minutes of their polling location. Bartow County has also written us into their 2026 budget to help them understand the gaps in their current infrastructure and help them completely redesign it if needed. Finally, in order to increase adoption of our work by elections officials facing a wide variety of electorates who want to improve their election infrastructure, we have started a rebranding process that focuses on increasing the efficiency of our country's election infrastructure. The goal is, as always, to increase access to polls for all Americans.

As always, we continue with the rigor of our software and modeling techniques. We have improved the robustness and the testing of our code base. We have increased the clarity of our documentation. We have developed new features in the analysis we give our partners to show a correlation between the demographic groups served by a polling location, and its likelihood of being closed in a redistricting effort.

This year we delivered our first paid contract, which consisted of an analysis of three counties in Georgia for Fair Fight Action. We are excited to have reached the point that Fair Fight sees the value in paying for the analysis we provide. We are also making progress in building relationships with elections officials. We attended the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) conference in February, which led to interest from officials at both the state and county levels. Additional contacts with elections officials came after the Bipartisan Policy Center saw the type of analysis we are doing and asked us to present to their election officials working group. We hope to have good news to share about clients once the budgets for next years' midterms are approved. Also, due to the rigorous nature of our work, the analysis paid off when an article co-authored by Susama Agarwala, Daphne Skipper and Chad Rosenberg, "Optimizing Fair Geographic Access to Polling," was accepted for publication in the Election Law Journal.

We also built out our analysis tools this year in response to features requested by potential customers. We now can create suggested precinct maps to go along with our suggested polling places. This has been repeatedly requested and respects the requirements in most states that precincts be made up of whole census blocks. Other major improvements came from discussions with counties about how to help them understand equity between urban and rural communities within their boundaries. We can now present access differences by urbanicity in the same way we present differences by race. Building this out required us to address in our algorithms the reality that an extra half mile for someone walking to the poll in the city is fundamentally different from an extra half mile for someone who is already driving 20 miles in the countryside. By adding an ability to use the logarithm of distance instead of absolute distance we can help election officials balance relative changes with absolute changes in travel distances.

Finally, we invested serious time and effort into internal technological improvements in our tools. We completely migrated storage to the cloud, built multiple suites of automated tests inside our optimization and placement programs. We cleaned up, standardized, and brought into accordance with best practices the code that we wrote while pushing up against the 2024 election. This allows us to enter the 2026 midterms focusing on our clients rather than trying to work around short-term decisions made in the height of the last election cycle.