Violating Voters’ Rights
Democrat House Leader Hakeem Jeffries claims that the Supreme Court of Virginia violated voters’ due process rights and disenfranchised them by issuing an “undemocratic” decision to overturn a “fair” ballot referendum.
IN FACT, the court’s decision stopped Democrats from disenfranchising nearly everyone else through an unconstitutional process. This ruling embodies why the founders of the U.S. rejected mobocracy in favor of a system that would better protect the rights of all. Here are the specifics:
- In late 2025 and early 2026, Virginia’s General Assembly carried out “party-line” votes to propose and approve an “amendment to the Constitution of Virginia that would temporarily suspend” part of the Constitution to allow the “General Assembly to redraw congressional districts” for the “upcoming November 2026 congressional elections.”
- The General Assembly then “enacted and published a new map for Virginia’s 11 congressional districts” that would “replace the existing nonpartisan map” that was split 6–5 in favor of Democrats with a “highly partisan gerrymandered map” that would likely be split 10–1 in favor of Democrats. The map would become operational if approved by a majority of voters through a ballot measure.
- Under the new map, the “51% of Virginians” who voted for Democrats would be “represented by 91%” of the state’s U.S. congressional delegation, while the “47% of Virginians” who voted for Republicans would be “represented by 9%” of the delegation.
- Democrats in the General Assembly then created language for the ballot measure that declared the map would “restore fairness in the upcoming elections” without any other description of what the map would do.
- Democrats like Barack Obama and Eric Holder encouraged Virginians to vote for the ballot measure by alleging that the new map was necessary to ensure fairness on a national level given what “Republicans started in Texas.”
- In reality, the new map in Texas offset prior Democrat gerrymanders by giving Republicans a likely partisan advantage in TX that was still 2 percentage points below the Democrat advantage in California BEFORE it redistricted, 4 points below the Democrat advantage in Illinois, 16 points below the Democrat advantage in Massachusetts, and 16 points below the likely Democrat advantage under Virginia’s proposed map.
- In March and April, the ballot measure for Virginia’s proposed map passed with 52% of Virginians voting for it and 48% against it.
- In May, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled 4–3 that the government “submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated” the state’s Constitution and “irreparably” undermined the “integrity of the resulting referendum vote,” rendering it “null and void.”
- Contrary to Jeffries, the case had nothing to do with due process, and neither the majority nor dissenting justices mentioned it.
- Early during the convention at which the U.S. Constitution was written, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, declared that the new government they were creating must provide “more effectually for the security of private rights and the steady dispensation of Justice.” He said that violations of these ideals “had more perhaps than any thing else, produced this convention.”
- Madison then singled out “democracy” as the cause of those abuses and pointed out that all societies are “divided into different Sects, Factions, and interests,” and “where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.” Thus, he emphasized that it was the duty of the Convention to “frame a republican system” of government that would better “guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.”
- Other delegates to the Convention concurred with Madison, like Edmund Randolph of Virginia, who observed “that the general object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the U.S. labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
- For the purpose of curbing such evils, Madison and the other framers of the Constitution developed a system of checks and balances on the powers of the government that they formed, such as the separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and a Constitution that couldn’t be easily amended.
- The Supreme Court of Virginia invoked those principles when it ruled that the process which Democrats used to enact their ballot measure violated the state’s Constitution.
