Virginia Supreme Court

By Michael Macagnone
CQ-Roll Call

(CQ-Roll Call) — Virginia’s Supreme Court invalidated the state’s new congressional map Friday, overturning a ballot measure adopted by voters that would have targeted several Republican-held House seats.

The majority opinion, written by Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, found that the legislative process to advance the ballot measure violated Virginia’s Constitution. “This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” the decision said.

The ruling means this fall’s midterm elections would be held under the current map, where Democrats hold six of the state’s 11 House seats. The ballot measure would have given Democrats a favorable chance of winning as many as 10 seats. Voters approved the new Democrat-drawn congressional map on April 21.

National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson of North Carolina praised the state court’s ruling in a statement Friday. The NRCC brought one of the cases against the state redistricting process.

“Virginia Democrats’ corrupt scheme to rig the map has been crushed in court, restoring fairness and protecting the future of the Commonwealth,” Hudson’s statement said.

Virginia Supreme Court

In the ruling, Kelsey wrote that the legislature’s process had numerous flaws, including that representatives passed the first part of the ballot measure during the early voting period before the November 2025 elections.

That violated a provision that prohibits such measures — ballot measures to pass a constitutional amendment — without having an “intervening election” between their passage, the ruling states.

The legislature approved the ballot measure on Oct. 31, 2025, after more than 1 million voters had already voted early before the election, Kelsey wrote.

The point of the requirement was so that voters could have the opportunity to vote out politicians who support an unpopular constitutional amendment before the House of Delegates later votes to actually place it on the ballot, Kelsey wrote.

“The efficacy of the second popular vote depends in part upon the reliability of the first,” Kelsey wrote.

State officials had appealed multiple lower court rulings that found the legislative process for the ballot measure violated the constitution.

The Democrat-held Virginia legislature started the redistricting process in 2025, passing the first step of the referendum in the weeks before the general election. The legislature then reconvened in January to set up the referendum for the vote last month.

Virginia Supreme Court

Virginia Chief Justice Cleo Powell, joined by Justices Thomas P. Mann and Junius P. Fulton III, dissented from the decision, arguing that the majority broadened the definition of “election” to get the result it wanted.

“Notwithstanding this bedrock principle, today the majority has broadened the meaning of the word ‘election,’ as used in the Virginia Constitution, to include the early voting period,” Powell wrote. “This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election.”

Former Virginia Republican Rep. Eric Cantor and former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, the co-chairs of Virginians for Fair Maps, one of the groups that opposed the redistricting, praised the ruling in a statement Friday. In a separate post on social media, Miyares stated that his office issued an opinion last year saying the redistricting effort was unconstitutional.

“Virginians spoke loud and clear in 2020 that voters should pick their elected officials, not the other way around,” the statement said.
Lawmaker reaction

Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., said in a statement Friday that the ruling was a “victory for Virginians’ right to fair and adequate representation against the democrats’ attempt to unfairly grab power through an unconstitutional gerrymander of Virginia.”

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., criticized the ruling for throwing out the votes of more than 3 million Virginians who approved the map. Kaine said the court should not have rejected voters’ efforts to counter Trump’s “brazen power grab” in redistricting efforts nationwide.

Virginia Supreme Court

Kaine also pointed out that the ruling came a week after the Supreme Court invalidated Louisiana’s congressional map with a second Black-majority district. “Meanwhile Virginia voters choose to stand up against national disenfranchisement only to see their votes cast into the trash by a 4-3 ruling,” Kaine said in a Friday statement.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., also criticized the ruling in a statement Friday, and said that Democrats would try to find a way to overturn the decision.

“Over three million Virginia citizens cast their votes in a free and fair election, yet the State Supreme Court has chosen to invalidate their voice, disenfranchise them and violate their due process rights,” Jeffries’ statement said. “The decision to overturn an entire election is an unprecedented and undemocratic action that cannot stand.”

Friday’s ruling reduces the number of potential seats up for grabs by Democrats in the fall midterms amid a flurry of mid-decade partisan redistricting nationwide. The current redistricting arms race started with a map passed by the Texas legislature last summer targeting five Democrat-held seats in the Lone Star State.

California soon followed with its own redistricting ballot measure targeting Republican seats. Florida, Missouri and others followed, targeting Democrat-held ones.

Since a Supreme Court decision last week invalidating a Louisiana congressional map with two Democrat-held seats, the redistricting effort has hit a new gear. Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama have started redistricting targeting their states’ remaining Democrat-held seats.