The new ruling leaves intact a Virginia Supreme Court decision that found that the process leading up to the recent referendum suffered from legal defects.
The U.S. Supreme Court late on May 15 rejected an appeal by Virginia officials who sought to challenge the Virginia Supreme Court’s recent decision to block a congressional map approved by voters that favored Democrats.
The unsigned order in Scott v. McDougle provided no reasons for the decision. No justices dissented.
The Democratic officials had asked the nation’s highest court to block the state supreme court’s ruling.
The referendum was approved by voters, 52 percent to 48 percent, on April 21. The change in electoral district boundaries was expected to give Democrats a 10-to-1 advantage over Republicans in the state’s U.S. House of Representatives delegation. The delegation currently has six Democrats versus five Republicans.
Don Scott, speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, told the high court in a filing that the state Supreme Court ruling should be stayed because that court was “deeply mistaken on two critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.”
“The decision below violates federal law in two separate ways. First, it predicated its interpretation of the Virginia Constitution on a grave misreading of federal law, which expressly fixes a single day for the ‘election’ of Representatives and Delegates to Congress,” Scott wrote.
Virginia’s highest court on May 8 threw out the voter-approved electoral map that was designed to flip four Republican-held congressional seats to Democrats, dealing a setback to Democratic hopes of retaking the U.S. House. Republicans also hold a majority in the U.S. Senate.
In a 4–3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court blocked the results of the Democrat-backed ballot measure, finding that Democratic lawmakers had not followed proper procedure last year when they rushed to approve the referendum in time to reach the ballot ahead of the November 2026 vote.
Normally, state legislatures redraw congressional maps after the U.S. census takes place every 10 years.
Last year, the redistricting battle started when Texas, with President Donald Trump’s backing, launched its redistricting effort to protect the Republican Party’s narrow majority in the U.S. House. Other state legislatures, including Republican-controlled Florida and Democratic-dominated California and Virginia. State lawmakers in several other states are currently in the process of redrawing their congressional maps.
Those redrawing efforts accelerated after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 on April 29 that race may not be the predominant, overriding reason for how congressional district lines are drawn.
Jackson Richman contributed to this report.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
