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Supreme Court rejects Virginia’s gerrymandering appeal after state court loss 7%
By Jordan Rubin0%
5/15/2026, 10:42:35 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Negativity Bias, with Politically Right Leaning Bias as the most egregious example at 16.4% saturation with 138 hits. Analysis detected 1,497 faulty-reasoning hits from 840 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 22.9% and a BS Rank of 7% (20,474 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 93.50% of the article peer group.
In the Supreme Court’s latest action that helps Republicans ahead of the midterms, the justices rejected Virginia Democrats’ emergency bid to save the state’s redistricting effort that voters approved last month.
Friday’s order follows the GOP-appointed majority’s recent Voting Rights Act ruling in Louisiana v.
Callais, which prompted Republican-led states to try to make their maps redder ahead of November’s elections.
Earlier this week, the high court majority granted emergency relief to Alabama Republicans who cited Callais as justification to use a congressional map that was previously deemed discriminatory.
The justices didn’t explain their decision in their unsigned order Friday, as is typical for emergency appeals.
None of the justices noted any dissent.
The rejection of Virginia’s appeal is another court win for Republicans in this election season because the state’s voters had approved a process for new congressional districts that were poised to deliver more seats to Democrats.
At President Donald Trump’s urging, Texas set off a wave of mid-decade redistricting last year that led other states, including Virginia, to follow suit.
In prior orders affecting congressional maps, the Supreme Court approved the Texas effort as well as a Democratic countermeasure in California while also helping New York Republicans hold onto a seat.
The GOP-appointed majority said in a 2019 ruling that federal courts can’t do anything about partisan gerrymandering.
Combined with Callais, that set the stage for Republicans to erase districts across the South that have been led by Black representatives and supported by Black voters, under the legal guise of partisanship rather than race.
The Callais ruling makes it even more difficult to prove that map-makers are motivated by improper racial considerations rather than the partisan ones that the high court majority has effectively approved.
The Virginia rejection was expected because, although the Supreme Court can hear appeals from state high courts, this case posed a challenge for Virginia officials.
That’s because the state court ruling they challenged was based largely on Virginia jurists’ interpretation of their state’s constitution, and the Supreme Court gets involved when there are federal issues to resolve.
The Virginia case didn’t squarely call into question the Voting Rights Act or other federal matters of the sort the justices have been ruling on in election cases.
Still, in their emergency appeal, Virginia Democrats maintained that their case presented federal issues warranting the justices’ attention.
The NAACP supported that position in an amicus brief, writing that invalidating Virginians’ votes “constitutes a deprivation of constitutional due process that requires this Court’s immediate intervention.”
Opposing the application, state Republicans argued, among other things, that the state high court’s ruling rested on “pure state-law grounds” and so “no federal issue is present” for the justices to take up.
The meaning of ‘election’
In the state court ruling that struck down the measure, Virginia’s justices split 4-3 in deciding that the process that put it on the ballot had violated Virginia’s Constitution.
The state’s amendment procedures are, per the state court majority, admittedly “laborious” and “slow-walk[ed]” to “guard against hasty changes.”
With that in mind, the majority explained that the process gives voters two chances to weigh in on a proposed amendment, the first time indirectly and the second time directly.
The first, indirect time is after legislators initially propose the amendment, when voters can choose to retain those representatives based on their position on the amendment.
The second, direct time occurs if it gets on the ballot, as this one did when voters approved it in April.
To get an amendment on the ballot, it actually needs to be approved twice by the state legislature before it goes to the voters.
In this case, the proposed amendment first passed the legislature on Oct. 31 and then in January before voters backed it at the ballot box last month.
The legal issue in the ruling centered on the first step in late October when the legislature voted after early voting began but before Election Day on Nov.
4.
That timing turned out to be crucial because the state constitution says the second approval must happen “after the next general election.”
So the case raised the question of whether the first vote technically happened prior to the November election.
The state court majority said it did not, reasoning that the phrase “general election” in this context included early voting.
The majority rejected what it called the state’s “thesis” that early voters “unknowingly forfeited their constitutionally protected opportunity” to base their November election votes on whether their representatives supported the amendment.
The dissent said the majority’s reading was an unnatural one that “broadened the meaning of the word ‘election’” and was “in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election.”
As for why the court didn’t rule until after voters approved the measure, the majority said that’s a “fair” question to ask but that Virginia officials have no right to complain because, the majority recalled, they insisted that the court couldn’t rule prior to the vote.
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