RICHMOND (LN) — The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday nullified a statewide referendum that would have authorized partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, ruling that the General Assembly violated the intervening-election requirement of Article XII, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution by casting its first vote on the proposed amendment after early voting in the 2025 general election had already begun.
The decision restores the court-drawn nonpartisan congressional maps adopted in 2021 as the governing maps for Virginia's 2026 congressional elections. Commentators across a wide spectrum of political views later described those maps as free of partisan bias, according to the opinion.
Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey traced the constitutional defect to October 31, 2025, when the General Assembly approved the proposed amendment for the first time during a disputed 2024 Special Session. By that date, more than 1.3 million Virginians — roughly 40% of the total electorate for that cycle — had already voted in the House of Delegates general election that Article XII, Section 1 requires to intervene between the legislature's two votes on any proposed amendment.
The amendment, had it taken effect, would have temporarily suspended Article II, Section 6-A — the 2020 voter-approved provision creating the Virginia Redistricting Commission — and authorized the General Assembly to redraw Virginia's 11 congressional districts in time for November 2026. The new map would have replaced the existing 6-5 partisan split in Virginia's congressional delegation with an expected 10-1 division, according to the opinion. Under the proposed alignment, approximately 47% of Virginians who voted for one major party's candidates congressional election would have been represented by 9% of the state's House delegation.
Virginia voters approved the referendum 1,604,276 to 1,499,393 — approximately 3.38% of total votes cast separating the two sides — after the General Assembly submitted the question to them on March 6, 2026, the first day of early voting. Kelsey held that the vote margin was legally irrelevant, writing that neither a high margin of success nor a single-digit margin logically or legally matters.
The court's central holding turned on the meaning of "general election" in Article XII, Section 1. The Commonwealth argued that the term refers only to Election Day — November 4, 2025 — meaning the legislature's October 31 vote fell four days and therefore satisfied the intervening-election requirement. The majority rejected that reading as apparently without precedent in Virginia's history, noting that of the 63 proposed amendments the General Assembly had advanced since adoption of the 1971 constitution, the Commonwealth could identify none in which the legislature had passed a proposed amendment after voting election had already begun.
Drawing on dictionary definitions from Samuel Johnson's 1755 lexicon through the current edition of Black's Law Dictionary, colonial Virginia voting practices, and federal appellate precedent, Kelsey concluded that an "election" encompasses the combined actions of voters casting ballots and election officials receiving them — beginning with the first day of early voting and ending when the polls close on Election Day. The court quoted the Fifth Circuit's formulation: "History confirms that 'election' includes both ballot casting and ballot receipt."
The majority also turned the Commonwealth's litigation strategy against it. Throughout the case, the state had successfully argued — over the challengers' objection — that Virginia precedent barred courts from reviewing the amendment process before voters had acted. Having secured that delay, the Commonwealth then suggested the referendum result itself should weigh against judicial review. The court was unmoved. At oral argument, the justices pressed the Commonwealth's counsel directly on whether the yes vote changed the constitutional calculus. Counsel answered: "No. It does not."
Chief Justice Powell, joined by Justices Mann and Fulton, dissented, arguing the majority's reading conflicts with the General Assembly's own statutory definition of "general election" as an election held in the Commonwealth on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November — a definition the legislature adopted in 1970 while simultaneously debating the 1971 constitutional amendments. The dissent contended that the majority bypassed the most basic rule of constitutional interpretation by looking to legislative history and dictionary definitions rather than the constitution's own text and the General Assembly's contemporaneous construction of it.
The 2021 nonpartisan maps — drawn after the Virginia Redistricting Commission deadlocked along party lines — received an overall "A" grade from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project for Virginia's U.S. House, House of Delegates, and Senate maps, and were described by a long list of nonpartisan analysts, as reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, as among the fairest in America.