The Virginia Supreme Court has struck down a Democrat-inspired gerrymandered congressional map that would have given the party four of the five seats currently held by Republicans in a state that is about as evenly divided as any in the country.
On March 6, 2026, the General Assembly of Virginia submitted to Virginia voters a proposed constitutional amendment that authorizes partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts in the Commonwealth. We hold that the legislative process employed to advance this proposal violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia. This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” said the 4-3 ruling.
“Virginians voted by a wide margin” in 2020 “to reform the redistricting process in the Commonwealth in an effort to end partisan gerrymandering,” the ruling continued. “They adopted Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia to create the Virginia Redistricting Commission. Under the 2020 amendment, if this bipartisan commission could not reach a consensus, the responsibility to achieve the amendment’s ultimate goal — ridding political partisanship as much as possible from the redistricting task — would become the constitutional responsibility of the Supreme Court of Virginia.”
“In 2021, partisan disputes in the Virginia Redistricting Commission deadlocked the 16-member commission. When the task fell to us pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A, we unanimously ordered that the prior district maps be replaced with wholly new maps that commentators across a wide spectrum of political views later deemed to be free of partisan bias,” the ruling noted further.