The Supreme Court has fueled a partisan redistricting war, giving Republican-led states the green light to draw new maps even after voting in some primaries had already begun.
WASHINGTON (CN) – In a defeat for Democrats, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a long-running emergency appeal to restore Virginia’s redistricting effort.
State legislators asked the judges to save a constitutional amendment allowing review after a The Virginia court dismissed it. The maps would give Democrats four congressional seats in the midterm elections. Unlike redistricting moves that give Republicans additional seats in red states, the Virginia redistricting was approved by more than 1.6 million voters.
Virginia Democrats said a state high court ruling that struck down the maps amounted to a “judicial challenge to the commonwealth’s constitution.” Using a “novel and clearly textual interpretation,” they argued that the state court “overrode the will of the people.”
Democrats began the two-year process in 2024 in response to Trump’s call for Texas to add additional Republican seats. Virginia’s proposed map scattered chunks of Northern Virginia — a densely populated, affluent and liberal region outside Washington, D.C. — across the state.
Amid several lawsuits from national and state Republicans, Virginia’s minority party challenged the amendment on a variety of grounds, including what they called procedural defects and the partisan nature of the ballot issue. Republicans mounted two primary challenges in rural Tazewell County, where a local judge ruled in their favor.
The high court’s decision hinged on the definition of the word election. Democrats in the General Assembly approved the amendment for the first time after nearly a million Virginians had already cast their ballots through early voting in the 2025 election.
Republicans successfully argued that early voting is part of an election — and therefore, Democrats lost the opportunity to use the fall 2025 election. Democrats argued that they met the constitutional requirement because an election is defined as the day the votes are counted.
Sided with the Republicans, Virginia’s highest court ruled that the election included any time a vote could be cast. But Democrats say that’s wrong — that early voting is only legal because it doesn’t extend the length of the election itself.
Typically, the US Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction to review state court decisions based on state constitutions. But Democrats said the Virginia high court ruling conflicted with federal law because it affected the definition of an election.
“The understanding of federal law upon which the Virginia Supreme Court based its decision was deeply flawed,” the lawmakers wrote. “He simply ignored federal statutes that settle the issue: ‘The Tuesday following the first Monday in November, in every even-numbered year, is established as election day.'”
While state courts are given broad authority over interpretations of state law, Democrats said there are limits to their authority. Three years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that state courts do not have the power to invalidate congressional maps under state law in Moore v. Harper.
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