Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democratic-led mid-decade congressional gerrymander

Virginia's Democratic-led General Assembly pursued a mid-decade redraw of the state's 11 U.S. House districts during its 2025 and 2026 sessions. Because Virginia's congressional maps are constitutionally assigned to a voter-established bipartisan redistricting commission, the legislature first advanced a constitutional amendment to temporarily return map-drawing power to itself. Voters narrowly ratified that amendment, 52% to 48%, in an April 21, 2026 special election, clearing a legislature-drawn map engineered to flip as many as four Republican-held seats — a plan that, according to Associated Press reporting, included a district "stretching out like a lobster to consume Republican-leaning rural areas" and revisions across Richmond, southern Virginia, and Hampton Roads that would have diluted conservative voting blocs.

On May 8, 2026, the Supreme Court of Virginia struck the amendment down. The court held that the General Assembly had violated the state constitution's multi-step process for placing amendments on the ballot — which requires approval in two separate legislative sessions with an intervening election — as well as a 1902 statute requiring publication of the amendment 90 days before that election. The legislature's first vote had been taken in an October 2025 special session while early voting in that year's general election was already underway. The court ruled that the violation "irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void," and ordered the state to use its existing court-drawn congressional map. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive the plan on May 15, 2026, after Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones filed an emergency appeal. The gerrymander never took effect; Virginia's current map, with six Democratic-leaning and five Republican-leaning districts, remains in place.

This is recorded as an attempted partisan gerrymander regardless of its outcome or which party drew it. Virginia's effort was an explicit response to a wave of Republican mid-decade redraws in states including Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee, several of them encouraged by President Donald Trump; that context explains the motive but does not change the classification. Under the publication's broken-windows principle, an abuse of power that is checked by the courts remains part of the record. The second mapped abuse, ignoring statutory requirements, rests on the affirmative judicial findings — by both a Tazewell County circuit judge in January 2026 and the Supreme Court of Virginia — that the legislature failed to follow the constitutional and statutory process for amending the constitution.