By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
(CNN) — Virginia’s Supreme Court dealt a blow to Democrats last week in the tit-for-tat redistricting war playing out ahead of the midterms.
In a 4-3 ruling, justices nullified a new congressional map that could have given the Democrats four additional seats in the House of Representatives. Their argument centered on whether state lawmakers had followed proper procedure when they put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to allow for the redistricting. The procedural question hinged on a linguistic technicality: What constitutes an “election”?
Traditionally — and in Virginia’s case, under the requirements of the state constitution — states have redrawn their congressional districts every 10 years, when a new census comes out and the 435 members of the House are reapportioned according to the states’ new shares of the population. But President Donald Trump, facing dismal polls and the risk of losing his party’s already tenuous House majority, has urged Republican-controlled states to launch an aggressive mid-decade round of redistricting, in the hopes of gerrymandering Democratic seats off the map.
Democratic-controlled states like California and Virginia have set out to draw gerrymanders of their own, aiming to wipe out Republican seats. Virginia voters, in a referendum last month, agreed to amend the state constitution to “temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections,” then to revert to the old rules after 2030.
That vote was meant to be the final part of the multistep process for amending the Virginia constitution. Before an amendment can go to a public referendum, it needs to be approved by the state legislature on two separate occasions: once before “the next general election,” and again after that election, under the newly chosen legislature.
The previous Virginia legislature passed the amendment on October 31, 2025. Election Day followed on November 4. The newly elected legislature then re-passed the amendment on January 16, 2026, to send it to the voters on April 21.
But four Virginia Supreme Court judges, three of them confirmed under Republican-controlled legislatures, ruled that the April voting was invalid. Although two successive legislatures had approved the amendment, the court argued that the first vote, back in October, had come too late — rather than voting before the election, as the constitutional timetable required, the legislature had voted after the 2025 general election was already happening.
In doing so, the court defined the “election” as having come into existence when early voting commenced on September 19, and not as merely taking place on Election Day. By the time Virginia’s General Assembly approved the amendment on October 31, the court argued, more than 1.3 million Virginians had already cast their ballots and therefore could not use their votes to express their approval or disapproval of the proposal.
“The definition of ‘election’ has always broadly denoted the ‘act of choosing,’” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority opinion.
Citing early dictionaries from lexicographers Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, as well as legal dictionaries such as Black’s Law Dictionary, Kelsey devoted several pages of the opinion to parsing the meaning of an “election.” He argued that average citizens who cast their ballots early would likely understand themselves to be voting in the election. “This lexical sense of the noun ‘election’ must be distinguished from the noun