The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, wiping out an effort that could have given Democrats an improved shot at winning as many as four additional U.S. House seats. The court said the state’s Democratic-led legislature failed to follow the required procedure when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot.
Voters had narrowly approved the amendment on April 21, but the court made clear that the vote could not stand. In its opinion, the seven justices wrote: “This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” ending the plan for now and leaving Virginia’s current 11-seat congressional map in place, with six Democrats and five Republicans.
The case did not turn on whether the new districts were politically favorable or how they were drawn. It focused instead on the process used to get the amendment before voters, a distinction that proved decisive once the dispute reached the state’s highest court. That court’s seven justices are appointed by the state legislature, a fact that sits in the background of a ruling that lands hard in a state where mapmaking has already moved through one unusual path after another.
Normally, legislative voting districts are redrawn once a decade after each census. In Virginia, a bipartisan redistricting commission failed to agree on a map after the 2020 census, so districts were imposed by a court. The disputed amendment was intended to authorize mid-decade redistricting, part of a broader nationwide battle over congressional maps ahead of the midterm elections. Friday’s ruling means that effort is now dead unless the legal and political fight starts over from the beginning.
For Democrats, the setback is immediate and concrete: the state’s current delegation remains six Democrats and five Republicans, and the redrawn districts that might have made all but one of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats more winnable for them are off the table. The unanswered question is whether party leaders will try to revive the effort through a new ballot measure, a new lawsuit or a different route entirely.
