Democrats in Virginia looked to pick up four congressional seats by a partisan gerrymandered map that passed the legislature and went to a referendum where it passed by a couple of points. Now the Virginia Supreme Court has stricken the referendum as not having followed Virginia constitutional requirements.
From the Opinion:
On March 6, 2026, the General Assembly of Virginia submitted to Virginia voters a proposed constitutional amendment that authorizes partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts in the Commonwealth. We hold that the legislative process employed to advance this proposal violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia. This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy.1***To us, it is common sense that the phrase “general election,” as used in the context of Article XII, Section 1, includes the combined actions of citizens casting votes and election officials receiving these votes and closing the polls on the last day of the election. The purpose of Article XII, Section 1 is to give voters the opportunity to participate in the process of amending their Constitution. It truly would be a foolish consistency if we insisted (and we do not) that the historical definition of “election” applies in exactly the same way to the plethora of different legal texts ensconced in different policy contexts. The dissent does just that with its inflexible, one-size-fits-all definition of “election” as a single 24-hour period, Election Day — the last day of voting. And that inflexibility, deployed by the Commonwealth in this case, ended up denying over 1.3 million Virginians their constitutional right to have a voice in the debate over whether their Constitution should be amended — thereby eroding one of the core rights that Article XII, Section 1 was intended to safeguard….In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia.31 This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void. For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.
MORE TO FOLLOW
I can’t see why SCOTUS would take a case where a state supreme court has ruled on state procedure for amending the state constitution. There aren’t any legitimate federal issues here.
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