Jeremy Smith is standing alongside a flatscreen the size of a small dinner table, giving a demo of a new app. Wearing a KEEP AUSTIN BEAUTIFUL shirt and cargo shorts, he balances a laptop on his left palm while his right hand scrolls around a map of an Austin neighborhood.

“You enter an address here in this lower bar and wait a few moments,” he tells the room, while typing awkwardly on his perched laptop.

After a noticeable lag, 20 or so map pins appear on the screen, similar to what you see if you search for a taqueria on Yelp or want to rent one of the electric scooters that have recently taken over downtown Austin. “Hit the list icon in the upper right-hand corner and you’ll see a list of addresses appear.”

SIGN UP TODAY Get the Backchannel newsletter for the best features and investigations on WIRED.

He pauses to make sure his audience is following on their smartphones.

“Wait, I don’t see that list pop up,” interjects one woman, staring hard at her phone. Smith leans over to help.

Around him, the walls are covered in inspiring slogans and printed placards. A small fridge is packed with Red Bull and microbrews. But Smith, 29, isn’t trying to launch the next Airbnb for bathrooms or Uber for aircraft or any such Silicon Valley lark. His unicorn dreams are, in some ways, much bigger: He wants to flip Texas from a red to a blue state by registering as many voters as possible. His startup is a nonprofit called Register2Vote.org, and he’s speaking to Democratic campaign staffers and volunteers.

Smith is in south Austin, in a space borrowed from a Democrat contesting a Republican incumbent in the upcoming midterms. The spirit of Silicon Valley, though, is in the room. In the tech world, politics has often been a distant abstraction. But Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 alarmed a lot of people, and the election was something of a call to arms (or a call to code, really) for even the moderately left-leaning. Suddenly, techies who might have been hard-pressed to locate any congressional district, much less a swing district in Texas, were building texting apps and advertising effectiveness services to help produce a much-talked-about “blue wave” in the midterm elections. One organization called Tech for Campaigns created an army of people with technical skills to help progressive political candidates. Tech for Campaigns didn’t exist two years ago but now has a roster of 8,700 volunteers ready for short-term assignments.

The mapping app Smith is demonstrating is a small example of this tech-politics nexus. It’s called MapTheVote, and it’s intended to track down citizens who haven’t registered to vote. Smith had the idea to create the app, but he didn’t have the technical skills. Through Tech for Campaigns he was introduced to a volunteer—an engineer in San Francisco who had founded his own geospatial data company. In a matter of weeks, the engineer and other volunteers had built the app’s user interface. Texas political realities, meet concerned Silicon Valley hackers.

As often happens with proposed tech solutions, though, there are some snags. In Texas, Democrats have been mostly locked into irrelevance. The party hasn’t won statewide office since 1994, and gerrymandered congressional districts are a realpolitik of entangled topology. The city of Austin, a blue island in a sea of mostly red, is subdivided into no fewer than six districts. The 35th, which packs in Democrats, resembles an amoeba undergoing cell division, with twin bulges in Austin and San Antonio connected by a single tendril running along Highway 35. Three districts start just south of Austin and stretch all the way to the Mexican border, some 250 miles away.

This crazy jigsaw-puzzle map is the result of two GOP-engineered redistrictings in 2003 and 2011. Following much drama and many lawsuits over the course of 15 years, the Texas congressional map went from being slightly more favorable to Democrats to the current configuration, which produced 25 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the current Congress.