Ten States Redrew Their Congressional Maps. The Address Data Hasn't Caught Up.

By the time Louisiana’s governor suspended the state’s congressional primary in May, about 42,000 voters had already mailed absentee ballots for the U.S. House, according to reporting by Votebeat and NPR. The Supreme Court had struck down the state’s congressional map on April 29, seventeen days before the election. The rest of the primary went ahead. The House votes did not count.

Louisiana’s was the most visible collision this year between district lines and the paper built on them, but it was not the only one. Ten states have enacted new congressional maps for the November 3 election — 181 districts, a little more than 40 percent of the House. The Census Bureau files that most of the address industry relies on to assign districts are scheduled for release in September. Ballots for military and overseas voters must be sent by September 19. October is the heaviest month of the year for political mail.

The result is a quiet gap in a great deal of data. A district column that came from a vendor this year is, in most cases, accurate — against the map that was in force when the file was built.

What Changed, and Where

The ten states and the routes their new maps took:

“Under challenge” means a lawsuit is pending. It does not mean the map is in doubt for November: in each state, courts have so far allowed the 2026 election to proceed on the enacted lines even where the underlying dispute is unresolved. Missouri’s remaining question concerns whether a referendum petition qualified, not which map the state is using this year.

The other 40 states and the District of Columbia will vote on the boundaries used in 2024. Five of the ten redrawn states — Texas, California, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio — account for 147 of the 181 districts.

The costs of redrawing so late have fallen largely on election offices. Louisiana officials estimated about $8 million to administer additional primaries, Votebeat reported; Alabama’s fiscal note put the cost of new elections at $4.5 million over two years. In Virginia, more than three million people voted in a redistricting referendum that the state Supreme Court later invalidated.

Why the Data Lags the Law

Nearly every district assignment in commercial address data comes from one source: the Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line boundary files. The bureau publishes a “Current” vintage, and for Congress the Current vintage is the 119th — the Congress seated in January 2025. Geocoding services and customer-relationship platforms that append a congressional district to an address generally match against those files or against data derived from them.

There is a practical reason for that dependence. TIGER is the only national set of district boundaries with consistent attributes, published on a fixed schedule and free to use. The alternative is to load each state’s enacted plan directly, and the ten plans come from ten publishers in several file formats and map projections, with the district number stored under a different field name in each. One state’s commission released a block-assignment table and a PDF rather than a map file. None of it is hidden, but all of it is work, and most vendors wait for the bureau to do that work once.

The bureau has said what its next release will contain. Its 2026 products will carry “the 120th Congressional Districts, and other geography effective as of January 1, 2026,” as submitted by the states, with shapefiles “planned for September 2026,” according to the Redistricting Data Program’s published schedule. Four of the ten states enacted or certified their maps after January 1: Florida on May 4, Tennessee on May 7, Louisiana on May 29 and Alabama, by certification, on June 10. The schedule does not say whether plans enacted after the reference date will appear in the September files or wait for the following year’s release.

A file assembled in March carries the 119th Congress lines in all ten states. So, in most cases, does a file assembled in October.

Which Mail Is Affected

Not all of it. Statewide races, ballot measures and registration or turnout mail that carries no district-specific message are unaffected by congressional boundaries.

House candidate mail is affected wherever a line moved. So is independent-expenditure and advocacy mail targeted by congressional district, the “find your representative” lookup on an advocacy organization’s website, any piece that prints a district number, and any mailing list built by selecting the addresses within a district. In Texas, where the legislature’s stated aim was to shift five seats, the universe of voters in a given district can differ substantially from the 2024 list.

State legislative mail is largely a separate matter. The ten actions are congressional maps; state senate and state house boundaries in these states are, with few exceptions, where they were.

Two Answers for One Address

The complication is that the old answer does not become wrong in November. Until January 3, 2027, the representative for any address is the one elected under the previous lines. The district that address votes in this fall is the new one. Both are facts, and they belong in separate columns.

Alabama illustrates the distance between them. The state’s current delegation was elected on a court-ordered map drawn after Allen v. Milligan, the 2023 Voting Rights Act case. The map Alabama will use in November is the legislature’s 2023 plan, which the Supreme Court allowed back into use for this cycle. For some Alabama addresses, the sitting representative and the November district do not correspond, and a mailer that identifies the incumbent as “your representative” is accurate for a voter who cannot vote for that incumbent this year.

Tennessee adds a complication of its own. The state eliminated the requirement that counties notify voters by mail of precinct and polling place changes, Votebeat reported. In the redrawn Memphis district, a campaign mailing may be the only notice some voters receive that anything has changed.

How to Check a File

Four checks, in order of effort.

Look for a vintage on the district column. A carefully built file records which Congress or which plan it was matched against — “119,” or “2026 plan” — rather than a bare “CD-21.” Absent a vintage, assume the 119th.

Compare a sample against the state’s published plan. Texas publishes PLANC2333 through its Legislative Council; California’s Proposition 50 map is on the state’s redistricting database. Twenty addresses are enough to settle the question.

Ask the vendor which map each state is on and when it was loaded. “Census TIGER, Current vintage” means the 119th Congress. A vendor that has loaded the state plans can name them.

Sample addresses on boundary streets. Errors concentrate where a district line follows a road. ZIP codes split by the new plan are the place to look.

What a Corrected Record Looks Like

RevAddress, which publishes this site, assigns districts from both sets of boundaries: the Census files for the seated Congress, and each redistricting state’s own enacted plan for November. The response below is from its districts endpoint for the Texas Capitol, which sits in one district this year and votes in another.

curl "https://api.revaddress.com/api/address/districts?streetAddress=1100+Congress+Ave&city=Austin&state=TX&ZIPCode=78701" \
-H "X-API-Key: rv_live_..."

{
"matched_address": "1100 CONGRESS AVE, AUSTIN, TX, 78701",
"districts": {
  "congressional": {
    "geoid": "4837",
    "district": "37",
    "vintage": "119",
    "representative": { "name": "Lloyd Doggett", "party": "D" }
  },
  "congressional_2026": {
    "geoid": "4810",
    "district": "10",
    "status": "in_effect_under_challenge",
    "status_as_of": "2026-08-20",
    "source": "state_enactment",
    "note": "Texas PLANC2333 (89th Legislature, 2nd C.S., 2025); in effect for 2026 under a U.S. Supreme Court stay while the merits appeal continues. Seats on 2026-cycle lines are filled at the November 2026 election..."
  },
  "state_senate": { "geoid": "48014", "district": "14", "vintage": "2024" },
  "state_house":  { "geoid": "48049", "district": "49", "vintage": "2024" }
}
}

The Capitol is in the 37th District today, represented by Lloyd Doggett, and will vote in the 10th in November. The first block carries a vintage and a representative, because the seat is filled. The second carries a status, the date the status was last checked, and a source field identifying the state’s enactment rather than the Census Bureau; no representative is attached, because no one has been elected to it. Outside the ten states the second block is absent, since the lines there did not move.

The company’s file service, Campaign File Clean, applies the same assignment to an uploaded spreadsheet. Each row comes back standardized and deduplicated, with its congressional, state senate and state house district, the sitting representative and both senators by name, and — in the ten states — the district it votes in this November. A report tallies rows by district and, in the redrawn states, the number of rows whose district changes between the two maps. Files of up to 10,000 rows cost $249; up to 100,000 rows, $497. The company calls each row’s result a reading, and says a reading describes the address — its districts and its representatives — never the household or the person at it. It works on files the customer already holds and does not sell, source or append voter data. The North Carolina county proof publishes all 100 county-level outputs from the same address-first decision model before a buyer uploads a file.

When the Census Bureau releases the 120th Congress files, the company says, each state’s plan will be compared against the official geometry and the record will note which one it matched. The status on each row is dated; if a court changes which map a state uses before November, the row changes with it.

The larger point does not depend on any vendor. Ballots in the ten states are being printed on the enacted maps. The data used to reach the voters who will cast them should be built on the same ones.

Sources

• Census Bureau, Redistricting Data Program, 2026 State Legislative District and 120th Congressional District TIGER/Line products, page revised July 27, 2026
• NPR, Ashley Lopez and Miles Parks, “Thrown-out ballots and map confusion: Voters are losing the redistricting battle,” May 14, 2026
• Votebeat, “Redistricting and Trump’s executive order could still change the rules of the 2026 election,” May 11, 2026
• Ballotpedia, Redistricting ahead of the 2026 elections; each state’s enactment checked against the state’s own publication on August 20, 2026