Democrats and their well-heeled funders have won their rigged referendum to rig Virginia’s congressional maps, but the political boundary battle isn’t over yet.
Now come the court challenges, and that’s where the redistricting revisionists could lose their big win thanks to their unabashed manipulation of Virginia law.
“It’s illegal actually for a number of reasons,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told me last week, a few days before Tuesday’s election, on The Dan O’Donnell Show in Milwaukee.
Snead asserts that Virginia Democrats, who hold the commonwealth’s political trifecta, have steamrolled the process while abandoning their plastic principles. His election watchdog organization is involved in one of several lawsuits challenging the maps and the referendum that gave Democrats the shaky imprimatur to implement them.
Hypocrisy on the Ballot
Following a lengthy early-balloting period, Virginia voters on Tuesday approved the most expensive ballot issue in the commonwealth’s history.
The fairly narrow “yes” victory changes the Virginia constitution, nixing a previous amendment that established an independent commission charged with drawing the 10-year political maps. The change gives the Democrat-controlled legislature the authority to put in place its drunkenly partisan congressional maps redrawn mid-decade to grab more House seats in November’s midterms.
If the rewrite stands, Virginia Democrats could add four House seats for a 10-1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. The revised maps would also give national Dems an easier path to taking back control of the House of Representatives.
Just six years after liberals declared the amendment creating the redistricting commission a “bipartisan win for redistricting reform,” the Democratic Party sought to blow it up. At least “temporarily.”
Yes, the maps represent one of the most grotesque gerrymandering jobs in history, defying the left’s sanctimonious position on map manipulation for political power. But new far-left Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who identifies as a moderate in the way Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride identifies as a woman, blames the left’s devil for driving Democrats’ change of heart.
“Virginia voters have spoken, and tonight they pushed back against a President who claims he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress,” Spanberger said of President Donald Trump’s call for Texas and other Republican states to redraw their maps ahead of the midterms to grab additional House seats.
Spanberger is not keen on context, however. And history.
“[W]hen Texas came in to do their redistricting in 2025, just a few months earlier the left had poured in $40 million into a left-wing ballot measure in Ohio to try to force that state to redistrict under new rules that would have flipped, had it succeeded, anywhere between three and six congressional districts from Republicans to Democrats,” Snead said.
Of course the left would be very little without hypocrisy.
‘Cancelled by the DC Suburbs’
While the naked power grab may be hypocritical, partisan map-making is not the problem — legally speaking.
“The federal Constitution was not written to protect political parties,” Charles Blahous, Senior Research Strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told me on Monday’s edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. “In fact, the founders hated political parties, factions or special interests of all kinds. The last thing they would have done would have been to write the Constitution to explicitly protect political parties.”
The legal issue, Blahous said, is the “absurd” contortion of the Democrats’ congressional maps.
Virginia’s constitution is quite explicit in its language requiring electoral districts to be “contiguous and compact.” One look will tell you the maps don’t fit the bill. Blahous said it’s like the late-Justice Potter Stewart’s famous aphorism on pornography: “I know it when you see it.”
Compactness is based on geographic districts, the premise that a voter should be able to vote in a district with people who live near them. Blahous said the Dems’ maps don’t come close to meeting the constitutional command.
Compactness is central to a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, the Virginia GOP and Virginia voters.
“The new plan is the least compact in the United States today and in Virginia history going back at least 74 years,” the lawsuit states. “The plan splits Northern Virginia five ways and bizarrely stretches these districts hundreds of miles into the Shenandoah Valley, central Virginia, and Tidewater.”
“This ensures that voices of downstate Virginians are cancelled by the DC suburbs — Washingtonians sending Washingtonians to Washington.”
‘Steamroll That Entire Process’
The legal troubles began long before the new maps were made, Snead said.
In an amicus brief filed in the Virginia Supreme Court, the Honest Elections Project argues that Tuesday’s referendum itself was illegal because the legislature unconstitutionally ran an extended “special session” to pass the measure setting up the ballot issue.
Under Virginia’s constitution, such amendment proposals must pass in two sessions of the legislature — with an intervening election. The special session began in 2024 and was extended in 2025 before Democrats added consideration of the redistricting effort to a session that was supposed to be about the budget.
Snead said the timelines laid out in the commonwealth’s constitution ensure that if the legislature pushes an unpopular constitutional amendment, voters have a chance to elect a new legislature and stop the process. There was no real pause on the road to the amendment question, the amicus brief asserts.
“What the Democrats in Richmond have done is steamroll that entire process,” Snead said.
Despite the legal questions before it, the Virginia Supreme Court in February stayed a lower court’s temporary injunction, a move that allowed the election to go on. The justices’ decision, however, did not “resolve the underlying legal claims about whether the General Assembly followed proper procedures in advancing the amendment,” the Virginia Mercury reported.
So the legal battles continue and the revised maps could still fail under the weight of a corrupted process.
Snead said he believes the litigation will now be moving through the courts at “lightning speed,” as the midterm primaries and general elections draw closer. He said Tuesday was not the end of the road but a “speed bump” for opponents of the Democrats’ maps.
“The Supreme Court of Virginia is going to have a chance to reject these maps, not for political or partisan reasons, but because the constitution and the laws of the state spell out how this is supposed to be done. Nobody gets to just brush those aside in the name of trying to amend the constitution for political power,” the election-integrity watchdog said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
