The Virginia Supreme Court has denied Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s attempt to certify the results of her redistricting constitutional amendment referendum, a procedural step Spanberger had scheduled for today. Now the court has more time to decide whether the governor violated the commonwealth’s Constitution in her mad dash to alter it. The arguments in Virginia’s high court did not go well for her on Monday.
The Virginia Constitution and state law are crystal clear. Before amendments can be added to the Constitution, they must pass through two separate sessions of the General Assembly, with a general election of the House of Delegates occurring between the two votes. Between those two votes, the clerk of the House must transmit the text of the proposed amendment to every circuit court clerk in the commonwealth at least 90 days before the amendment is voted on. The language used on the referendum ballot must be an honest and accurate description of what the proposed amendment would do.
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Spanberger and her Democratic allies failed to comply with any of these safeguards, and Monday’s arguments suggested that the Virginia Supreme Court is taking objections seriously. If the court agrees, Spanberger could suffer a humiliating and deserved defeat that would undo her attempt to dilute the representation of millions of rural voters.
The requirements she ignored should not be dispensed with because they are politically inconvenient for the party in power. That is when they must be most staunchly defended and upheld. They are part of an intentionally interlocking process designed to ensure that drastic changes to the commonwealth’s most important governing document are not made in haste for purely partisan ends. Each exists to guarantee that voters have the time, notice, and information necessary to understand proposed changes before they are asked to ratify them.
On the first requirement, Virginia Democrats rushed through the first vote on the proposed amendment on Oct. 31, 2025, mere days before voting ended in Virginia’s off-year legislative elections. In court, Democrats claimed that the word “election” in the Constitution means only “Election Day,” but Democrats have been stretching the beginning of elections far before actual Election Day for years. In 2025, voters had been casting ballots for more than a month before Democrats rammed through their redistricting amendment on a purely partisan basis, and more than 1 million ballots had already been cast.
Even if the Virginia Supreme Court decides that the 2025 elections began on Election Day and not Sept. 19, 2025, when voting started, Democrats still failed to send the text of the amendment to every circuit court clerk in the state 90 days before the vote on the constitutional amendment. The General Assembly passed the proposed amendment for the second required time on Jan. 16, leaving only five days to distribute it before Jan. 21, which was 90 days before the scheduled election. Democrats failed to meet this requirement as well.
Finally, Virginia law requires all proposed amendments to include a description of what the amendment would do. According to statute, this description must be a “neutral explanation” in “plain English” and may not include advocacy language. Despite this legal requirement, the ballot measure described the amendment as necessary to “restore fairness in the upcoming elections.” How is substituting a fair six Democrat, five Republican congressional map with a 10 Democrat, one Republican map “fair” when it slashes the opposition party’s congressional representation to only about a quarter of what is implied by its vote tally? It is not. Anyone with common sense can see Democrats violated this requirement, too.
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Spanberger and her Democratic allies are upset because President Donald Trump urged Texas to redraw its congressional map between the normal 10-year census windows. But just because Trump and Texas Republicans ignored norms does not give Spanberger and Virginia Democrats the right to violate the Virginia Constitution. It only undermines the democratic norms Democrats claim to hold dear.
It is to be hoped that the Virginia Supreme Court will prove to have more integrity than Virginia Democrats.
