By Del. Wren Williams, 47th District Representative
On May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia struck down the redistricting amendment that voters approved at the April 21 special election. The decision was four to three. The amendment is void, and the 2021 congressional maps remain in place for the November 2026 election.
Start with what Virginians actually voted for back in 2020. By a wide margin, voters passed a constitutional amendment to take congressional redistricting away from the politicians and place it with a bipartisan commission. When that commission deadlocked in 2021, the responsibility fell to the Supreme Court of Virginia. The Court drew the current maps. Independent analysts gave those maps an A. They produced a 6 to 5 congressional split that reflects how Virginia actually votes. That was the deal Virginians made with themselves. Take the politics out of redistricting.
The April 21 amendment would have undone that deal. It would have flipped a 6 to 5 map to 10 to 1. Forty-seven percent of Virginia voters who chose one major party in the last congressional election would have been represented by nine percent of our congressional delegation. About half of the Commonwealth, represented by one seat out of eleven. That is not fairness. That is the gerrymander our 2020 reform was designed to prevent.
The legal problem is straightforward. Our Constitution has strict rules for amending it. The General Assembly has to pass a proposed amendment twice, in two different sessions, with a House of Delegates election in between. That intervening election is the people’s safeguard. It is how voters get a say by choosing delegates who support or oppose the proposal.
The Democrat majority took the first vote on October 31, 2025. By that day, 1.3 million Virginians had already cast their ballots in the November House of Delegates election. Forty percent of the total turnout was already in the books. Those voters never had a chance to weigh in on the amendment, because the amendment did not exist when they voted.
Then the Democrat majority went into court and argued those 1.3 million voters did not really count. They told the Supreme Court of Virginia that an election is only one day, that everything before Election Day is not really the election, and that early voters had, in their words, squandered their constitutional opportunity by accepting the Commonwealth’s own invitation to vote early.
This is the same party that has spent a decade telling Virginians early voting is voting. They built statutes around that premise. They campaigned on it. Then in this case, they argued the opposite. Justice Kelsey, writing for the majority, said the Commonwealth’s view, in his words, would be unrecognizable to the average citizen.
That contradiction is the heart of the case. The Court found that an election, as our Constitution uses the term, includes both the casting and the receipt of ballots. It is not just one day. It is the whole window during which voters participate. Because the Democrat majority took the first legislative vote after the 2025 election was already underway, the Court ruled the amendment process violated Article 12, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution. The April 21 result is null and void.
Step back and think about what went into this fight. Tens of millions of dollars. Public money on the litigation side. Substantial out-of-state donors on the campaign side. A ballot question that asked voters whether they wanted to, in its words, restore fairness, without mentioning gerrymandering and without mentioning that the proposed map would silence half the state. The amendment passed by 1.69 percent.
This was never about Virginia. Our 2021 maps were drawn by the Supreme Court of Virginia under a reform Virginians overwhelmingly approved. Nothing about Virginia was broken. This was a national gerrymandering scheme that used Virginia as the vehicle, sold to Virginia voters with a misleading ballot question, and pushed through a process the Court has now ruled unconstitutional.
I will leave you with the line from Justice Kelsey’s opinion that I think captures the whole ruling. “While the Commonwealth is free by its lights to do the right thing for the right reason, the Rule of Law requires that it be done the right way.” The right way is what our Constitution requires. The right way is what voters were entitled to. And the right way is what the Supreme Court of Virginia restored on May 8th.
Thank you for the privilege of representing the 47th District in the House of Delegates.
Williams can be reached at (804) 698-1047 or email DelW Williams@house.virginia.gov.
Del. Wren Williams represents the 47th District in the Virginia House of Delegates.
