Virginia’s Supreme Court dealt a blow to Democrats final week within the tit-for-tat redistricting war enjoying out forward of the midterms.
In a 4-3 ruling, justices nullified a new congressional map that might have given the Democrats 4 extra seats within the House of Representatives. Their argument centered on whether or not state lawmakers had adopted correct process once they put a constitutional modification on the poll to permit for the redistricting. The procedural query hinged on a linguistic technicality: What constitutes an “election”?
EDITOR’S NOTE: NCS’s “Word of the Week” brings you the which means behind the phrases within the information.
Traditionally — and in Virginia’s case, beneath the necessities of the state structure — states have redrawn their congressional districts each 10 years, when a new census comes out and the 435 members of the House are reapportioned based on the states’ new shares of the inhabitants. But President Donald Trump, dealing with dismal polls and the danger of shedding his get together’s already tenuous House majority, has urged Republican-controlled states to launch an aggressive mid-decade spherical of redistricting, within the hopes of gerrymandering Democratic seats off the map.
Democratic-controlled states like California and Virginia have set out to attract gerrymanders of their very own, aiming to wipe out Republican seats. Virginia voters, in a referendum final month, agreed to amend the state structure to “temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections,” then to revert to the outdated guidelines after 2030.
That vote was meant to be the ultimate a part of the multistep process for amending the Virginia structure. Before an modification can go to a public referendum, it must be permitted by the state legislature on two separate events: as soon as earlier than “the next general election,” and once more after that election, beneath the newly chosen legislature.
The earlier Virginia legislature handed the modification on October 31, 2025. Election Day adopted on November 4. The newly elected legislature then re-passed the modification on January 16, 2026, to ship it to the voters on April 21.
But 4 Virginia Supreme Court judges, three of them confirmed beneath Republican-controlled legislatures, dominated that the April voting was invalid. Although two successive legislatures had permitted the modification, the courtroom argued that the primary vote, again in October, had come too late — relatively than voting earlier than the election, because the constitutional timetable required, the legislature had voted after the 2025 normal election was already occurring.
In doing so, the courtroom outlined the “election” as having come into existence when early voting commenced on September 19, and never as merely happening on Election Day. By the time Virginia’s General Assembly permitted the modification on October 31, the courtroom argued, greater than 1.3 million Virginians had already forged their ballots and due to this fact couldn’t use their votes to specific their approval or disapproval of the proposal.
“The definition of ‘election’ has always broadly denoted the ‘act of choosing,’” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote within the majority opinion.
Citing early dictionaries from lexicographers Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, in addition to authorized dictionaries resembling Black’s Law Dictionary, Kelsey devoted a number of pages of the opinion to parsing the which means of an “election.” He argued that common residents who forged their ballots early would probably perceive themselves to be voting within the election. “This lexical sense of the noun ‘election’ must be distinguished from the noun phrase ‘election day,’” he wrote.
He continued, “The metes and bounds of an election begin with the point of casting votes and end with the point of receiving votes and closing the polls on the last day of the election. Election Day is the boundary marker for the last act constituting an election.”
The minority took difficulty with this definition. An election, the justices on the shedding facet countered, is the occasion that occurs on Election Day.
“By focusing on the legislative history, dictionary definitions, and how legal scholars might interpret the term ‘election,’” Chief Justice Cleo Powell wrote in dissent, “The majority fails to apply the most basic tenet of interpretation of constitutional provisions: looking to the language of the constitution itself.”
Powell argued that almost all’s definition of “election” contradicts how the phrase is outlined in state and federal regulation. She cited a provision of Virginia’s constitution that states that the members of the House of Delegates “shall be elected … on the Tuesday succeeding the first Monday in November.” She additionally cited the Virginia code, which signifies {that a} “general election” is “an election held in the Commonwealth on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.”
To make its level, the dissent ventured into metaphysical concerns concerning the mechanics of time. Treating the early voting interval as a part of the election would create a “causality paradox,” the dissent argued. “An election is a process that begins with early voting, but early voting must precede an election by forty-five days,” Powell wrote. “The majority’s definition creates an infinite voting loop that appears to have no established beginning, only a definitive end: Election Day.”
The dissent argued that almost all’s definition of “election” poses different conundrums as nicely: For instance, Virginia regulation stipulates that voters can’t be compelled to attend trials throughout the time of an election. Does this imply that the courts are successfully hamstrung for a number of weeks from the beginning of early voting to Election Day?
By some assessments, either side made affordable and solidly sourced arguments. But the diploma to which they fixated on the definition of “election” appeared to strike at the least one analyst as pedantic. Vox’s Ian Millhiser put it this manner: “Rather than producing two eye-glazing opinions fighting over the meaning of a word whose definition appears to shift depending on both linguistic and historical context, the justices would have produced a better opinion if they had asked a more basic question: What is the relevant provision of the Virginia Constitution actually supposed to accomplish?”
That extra primary query is, in some methods, tougher to answer.
The courtroom’s majority wrote that the laborious technique of amending the structure provides voters each an oblique and a direct alternative to voice their views on a proposed change, voting for or in opposition to the legislators who initially approve an modification, after which voting on the modification itself. But if the justices had been involved concerning the will of the 1.3 million early voters who forged their ballots earlier than the legislators permitted the redistricting modification, they appeared to gloss over the greater than 1.6 million Virginians who voted in favor of the new maps, says Carolyn Fiddler, a Virginia state politics expert who has beforehand labored for Democratic and progressive organizations.
“How can they say that voters didn’t have a say?” she says. “Voters had a say and a clear majority.”
The textual content of Virginia’s Constitution doesn’t develop on why the constitutional modification course of is structured the way in which it’s. But what it doesn’t say is illuminating, says Quinn Yeargain, a regulation professor at Michigan State University. Virginia’s previous constitution, from 1902, specified that the legislature should publicize a proposed modification to voters three months earlier than the intervening election. When the structure was revised in 1971, that requirement was omitted.
“So they effectively made it easier, then, to amend the constitution,” Yeargain says. “At that point, they knew exactly how to use the words to achieve the kind of thing the majority said that it was trying to achieve. And they took those words out.”
Democratic officers in Virginia have requested the US Supreme Court to reinstate the new map for the midterms, although the emergency appeal is unlikely to succeed.
The Virginia Supreme Court ruling, with its insistence that an election begins on the first alternative for balloting, stands in obvious distinction to different redistricting choices. After the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act determination in Louisiana v. Callais made it tougher for voters of colour to problem redistricting plans as discriminatory, Southern states have scrambled to redraw their congressional maps in ways in which favor the GOP — in some circumstances, after early votes in main elections had already been counted. The new maps will make this 12 months’s House elections the least aggressive on report, the journalist G. Elliott Morris wrote in his Substack publication Strength In Numbers.
The present redistricting battle makes for a “deeply dissatisfying situation from beginning to end,” Yeargain says. On its personal, Yeargain says he doesn’t a lot look after Virginia’s proposed redistricting modification, however the nationwide battle goes past the person deserves of every state’s plans.
“Instead, we’re asking a broader question,” he says. “And that is whether this year’s congressional elections are going to be legitimate in some form or another.”
What is an “election,” precisely? Virginia’s Supreme Court majority sought an answer in dictionaries, which outline the phrase because the act or course of of selecting. But who’s doing the selecting? As Republicans aggressively redraw electoral maps on the behest of the president, and as Democrats try to counterbalance these efforts with their very own redistricting, it seems that a extra consequential election — one wherein politicians select their voters — is already nicely underway.