For an opposing point of view, see “The Virginia Constitution is clear. Why the Virginia Supreme Court should uphold redistricting amendment,” by former U.S. Attorney Timothy Heaphy.
To understand why a Tazewell County judge nullified Virginia’s redistricting referendum the day after voters cast their ballots, you have to start where the General Assembly started: with a special session that should have ended in 2024.
Governor Glenn Youngkin called that session in May 2024 to resolve a budget dispute. Legislators passed a budget. The session was never formally adjourned. It sat technically open for sixteen months. Then, on October 23, 2025, after North Carolina enacted new congressional maps, Democratic leadership called legislators back to Richmond and used that still-open 2024 session to take up something that had nothing to do with budgets: a constitutional amendment authorizing the General Assembly to redraw congressional districts mid-decade. The House passed it on October 29. The Senate passed it on October 31. Four days later, voters elected a new House of Delegates. The new General Assembly approved the amendment a second time in January 2026. Governor Spanberger signed enabling legislation on February 4. The referendum was scheduled for April 21.
Almost immediately, lawsuits followed. The RNC filed in Tazewell. So did Republican legislative leaders in a parallel case now pending before the Supreme Court of Virginia. A trial judge enjoined the referendum in February. The Supreme Court stayed that injunction on March 4 and let the vote proceed, but expressly declined to decide the merits. Voters went to the polls. The amendment passed by a narrow margin. On April 22, less than twenty-four hours after polls closed, Judge Jack Hurley of the Tazewell Circuit Court declared the entire amendment void from the beginning. On April 23, the attorney general filed a 38-page emergency motion in the Court of Appeals asking for a stay. Hearings begin Monday.
The emergency motion is worth reading carefully. It is also worth reading carefully for what is not in it.
The full ballot question voters saw read: “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?”
That phrase in the middle, “to restore fairness in the upcoming elections,” does not appear anywhere in the attorney general’s brief. The solicitor general quotes “temporarily adopt new congressional districts” on one side, quotes “ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes” on the other, and stitches them together with a “while” of his own invention. The eight words in between, the words at the heart of the constitutional dispute, are surgically excised.
Those eight words are why the Tazewell court ruled the way it did. “To restore fairness in the upcoming elections” is not a description of an amendment. It is a campaign slogan written into the ballot question itself, telling voters that a “yes” vote restores fairness and a “no” vote opposes it. That is not a question. It is an answer wearing a question mark. If the attorney general could defend that language, he would have quoted it. He did not quote it because he cannot defend it.
The brief’s central textual argument is no stronger. To make the constitutional math work, the attorney general has to insist that “the election” means one Tuesday in November and nothing else. The intervening election required by Article XII, he writes, is a “fixed constitutional event” on a single date. Early voting is “merely statutory.” Ballots cast in September, October and early November are not part of “the election” as Article XII understands it.
This is, to put it mildly, a remarkable position for the attorney general of Virginia to take. For the better part of a decade, the political coalition now running the Office of the Attorney General has insisted that early voting is voting, full stop. They expanded it. They defended it in court. They told Virginians that ballots cast forty-five days before Election Day count just the same as ballots cast on Election Day, because they are votes in the election. They built drop boxes, extended deadlines and litigated cases on the premise that an election is the entire window in which a citizen can lawfully cast a ballot.
Now, when Article XII inconveniently requires a House of Delegates election to fall between two legislative approvals, suddenly early voting is not voting. Suddenly the election is one day. Suddenly the millions of Virginians who had already cast ballots in the November 2025 election before the General Assembly took up HJR 6007 on October 29 were not casting ballots in “the election” at all. They were doing something else. The attorney general does not say what.
You cannot tell voters that early voting is real for ten years and then tell a court it is not real because you need Article XII to fit. Either the election is a 45-day window or it is one Tuesday in November. The attorney general does not get to choose which one based on which day of the week the courthouse is open.
Then there is the satellite-office defense. In one of the brief’s more revealing passages, the solicitor general argues that the General Assembly was actually being generous to “no” voters by mandating expanded satellite offices in counties like Tazewell. This is offered as evidence of the legislature’s good faith, a kind of bone tossed to rural voters from the same body that wrote the campaign slogan into the ballot.
There is one problem. The satellite-office mandate in HB 1384 does not take effect until July 1, 2026. The brief itself concedes this on page 27. The mandate could not have helped a single voter in the April 21 referendum because it was not the law on April 21. Whatever satellite offices opened in Tazewell during early voting opened under preexisting law, not under the mandate the attorney general now claims as a generosity to opponents of the amendment. You cannot claim credit for a kindness that was not in effect when the kindness would have mattered. The plane had already taken off when the General Assembly built the runway.
There is one final argument worth flagging. The attorney general invokes Scott v. James, the 1912 case holding that courts of equity will not enjoin the holding of an election. Read the brief’s own quotations carefully. The case bars courts from stopping an election, not from reviewing one. If a court cannot intercede before the election and cannot intercede after the election, then when exactly is the constitutional process subject to judicial review? The attorney general has no answer because there is no answer. Article XII would be unenforceable.
Three million Virginians went to the polls. They deserve a process that respects them enough to ask a real question. They deserve a constitutional amendment process that follows Article XII as it is written, not as it is rewritten in an emergency motion. The Tazewell Circuit Court read what the Constitution requires. Monday morning, the Virginia Supreme Court will be asked to do the same.
Del. Wren Williams represents the 47th District in the Virginia House of Delegates and is an attorney in Stuart. He is a Republican.
