NYT (“In Huge Blow to Democrats, Virginia Court Strikes Down House Map“):
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a measure allowing state Democrats to redraw congressional districts, dealing a significant blow to the party’s efforts to keep pace with Republicans in a nationwide redistricting battle.
The ruling wipes out four Democratic-leaning U.S. House seats in Virginia and means that Republicans will enter the midterms with a structural advantage from their moves to carve out newly red districts across the country.
In the Virginia court’s 4-to-3 decision, the majority wrote that Democratic legislators had put a constitutional amendment to allow for a new map before voters in “an unprecedented manner” that violated the state’s constitution, adding, “This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.”
[…]
In Virginia, voters approved the amendment in a statewide referendum by about three percentage points, according to the most recent tally, after the General Assembly had passed it twice. But Republicans challenged nearly every aspect of the process. Most of these lawsuits were filed before in a county court in the rural southwestern corner of the state, where a judge repeatedly ruled in the Republicans’ favor. These rulings were appealed to the State Supreme Court.
[…]
In lawsuits, Republicans argued that the language in the amendment was misleading, that the new districts were not drawn compactly, that it was improper to vote on redistricting at a legislative session that had convened to discuss budget issues and that a state law required county clerks to post notices about the amendment months before it was actually voted on.
One of the most critical questions concerned the sequence of events in Virginia’s complex amendment process. Before voters weigh in on an amendment to the State Constitution, the General Assembly must approve it twice, with an election for the state House of Delegates taking place between the two votes. The first vote for this amendment was on Oct. 31, just days before the state election. With hundreds of thousands of Virginians having already voted, Republicans argued that the legislative action had come too late.
The court sided with that argument.
“Early Virginia voters unknowingly forfeited their constitutionally protected opportunity to vote for or against delegates who favor or disfavor amending the Constitution by not anticipating a legislative vote on a constitutional amendment four days before the last day of voting,” the court’s majority wrote in its ruling.
But the loss in Virginia is likely to only further stoke more redistricting battles. Already, Democrats in New York and Colorado have signaled a desire to try and redraw their maps before the 2028 elections, and Virginia Democrats are likely to be in a similar position, since the court mainly took issue with the process, not with the resulting map.
The irony here is that efforts by Democrats going back years to make elections more (small-d) democratic have undermined their efforts to fight fire with fire in the gerrymandering wars. Virginians amended our constitution years ago to have our Congressional districts drawn by a nonpartisan commission. So, to fight back against Texas’ and other red states’ gerrymander with a gerrymander of our own required amending the Commonwealth’s constitution to allow it. But we also allow voting in all of our elections to stretch for weeks, in an effort to maximize the opportunity for Virginians to make their voice heard. Alas, that made it harder to quickly get the constitutional amendment on the ballot.
The outcome here is legally correct. Taken in a vacuum, it’s also a blow for democracy and the rule of law. Alas, in the context of Republican legislatures elsewhere—at the behest of the Republican President of the United States—to stack the midterm deck in their favor, it creates an uneven playing field.
It’s also notable that the requirement of a case in controversy to obtain a binding judicial ruling can be a major problem in our system. Some $100 million was spent on this effort. 3.1 million people showed up to vote. Volunteer election officials spent untold manhours working the polls. Schools were closed throughout the state for the day, with all the ancillary childcare impacts. All for naught.
UPDATE/ADDENDUM by SLT
James beat me to this post by a few minutes, so I took mine down, but will share this:
I have three thoughts.
- I still think that the national political environment favors Dems taking the House, but this is a blow to that goal, given the other gerrymandering being done in red states.
- This kind of decision is going to deepen a lot of frustration that national politics is (and I hate to even use the word since it has been so demeaned by the sitting president), rigged against Democrats. I cannot speak to the legal reasoning in the case, but on the fact of it is frustrating to see Louisiana just suspend primaries, or watch Tennessee redistrict in a few days, or for Florida to do so seemingly in violation of its state constitution, and yet Virginia consults its voters and is told “nope!”
- All of this is profoundly deepening my frustration with a system that privileges lines on a map over the will of voters.
