From the EPEC Team Newsletter:
Virginia’s Special Election to allow gerrymandered congressional maps is voided, the Commonwealth’s highest court ruled today (4-3), citing numerous constitutional violations.
Assembly Democrats will not be able to draw new congressional maps from the current 6-5 (D-R) configuration to the 10-1 (D-R) map proposals.
Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court of Virginia is a huge win for Republican lawmakers who filed multiple legal challenges prior to the vote, asserting Democrats ignored strict constitutional requirements in their rush to send a constitutional referendum to the voters ahead of the midterm elections in the fall.
The high court agreed. The ruling is here.
“You cannot violate the Constitution to change the Constitution,” said VA Sen. Ryan McDougle, one of the plaintiffs.
In a statement, Democrat Attorney General Jay Jones claimed the court’s ruling was partisan and “put politics over the rule of law by issuing a ruling that overturns the April 21st special election on redistricting.”
However, attorneys representing the Commonwealth before SCOVA on April 27th admitted that the vote results had no bearing on the legal issues that were raised before the Special Election started.
The decision affirmed that, with the court writing:
“On the issues before us in this case, we hold that the ultimate vote margin plays no role in the analytics of our judicial review of the constitutionality of the pre-election constitutional amendment process.”
More than one million Virginians had cast a ballot during early voting in 2025 when the Democrat-majority assembly passed the first of its constitutional referendum bills; they claimed it was still an “intervening” election per the requirements for changing the constitution because it happened before Election Day, April 21.
It was a key point in the legal challenges. The high court took issue with their argument that early voting really didn’t count as an election.
The opinion added:
With that perspective, imagine one of the over one million Virginians who had voted in person before Election Day in 2025 walking into a polling place. The voter says to the officer of election, “I am here to vote in the election.” The officer of election responds, “we are not conducting an election here.” “But that’s why I am here,” the voter replies. “Maybe so, but let me explain,” the officer of election insists, “you can vote in the election, but we are not conducting an election today. Elections are only conducted on Election Day.
Reaction:
“The Virginia Supreme Court just cooked ‘the Lobster,’ and with it, the ambitions of Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democratic establishment,” wrote Jonathan Turley, who teaches law at George Washington University Law School.
“All is left is a lingering sense of betrayal by GOP and independent voters who faced erasure from the gerrymander.”
Turley was referring to the proposed map’s Congressional District 7, which became notorious for its extreme gerrymander in the shape of a lobster, with Fairfax County populations as the tail.
The ruling means Republicans hang on to four seats in the redistricting wars that have intensified with Democrats since the Supreme Court’s landmark 6-3 decision to strike down racially drawn congressional districts and narrow the reading of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
At least two of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts are still deploying the VRA to draw congressional districts by race, which the Supreme Court has ruled is unconstitutional discrimination.
It is highly likely Virginia will be facing more litigation in the near future to address those maps as groups and even the Dept. of Justice look at the next steps.
Southern states are already preparing to re-draw congressional maps. The Tennessee legislature just redrew a racially gerrymandered seat to give Republicans a likely 9-0 seat advantage.
In all Republicans are looking to pick up maybe 14-16 congressional seats from redistricting while Democrats are looking to re-draw maps that have already been gerrymandered in the extreme.
In Virginia’s case, the high court stood by the strict requirements of the Commonwealth’s constitution — and its own role in the 2021 congressional maps — when it ruled the Democrats had not followed them in their rush to redistrict.
Thomas McCarthy, one of the attorneys for the Republican challengers, appeared to score key points with the VA high court during oral arguments when he pointed out that the assembly Democrats passed a constitutional referendum using a Special Session that began in 2024, in the middle of 2025 election early voting, without sufficient 90-day notice.
“It is not how the process is supposed to work,” he added.
“It is the people, the people of the Commonwealth – the voters — who possess the power to amend or modify the constitution,” he told the justices. “And denying them the knowledge that this proposed amendment was coming through, should undermine the whole process.”