A Virginia circuit court judge has delivered a sharp rebuke to the General Assembly, striking down a redistricting amendment that lawmakers attempted to advance during a 2024 special legislative session. The ruling, issued Tuesday by Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack S. Hurley Jr., blocks the amendment entirely and prevents it from ever being submitted to voters, dealing a significant blow to efforts to alter how congressional and legislative districts are drawn in the Commonwealth.
At the heart of the case was a basic but consequential question: whether lawmakers could lawfully take up a redistricting-related constitutional amendment during a special session that was convened for budgetary purposes. Judge Hurley’s answer was unequivocal. They could not. In a sweeping opinion, he found that the General Assembly violated both its own procedural rules and constitutional requirements governing elections and voter notice.
Hurley emphasized that legislative bodies are not free to disregard the limits they place on themselves. While the General Assembly has broad authority, it must still follow its own resolutions and rules when conducting business.
In this case, lawmakers expanded the scope of the special session to include redistricting without securing the unanimous consent or supermajority vote required to do so. As a result, the court found that the joint resolution proposing the constitutional amendment fell outside the boundaries lawmakers themselves had established.
The language of the ruling was unusually firm. Hurley declared the action “void, ab initio,” meaning legally invalid from the outset. In other words, the amendment was never properly before the legislature at all.
The decision also addressed a key timing argument raised by lawmakers: that an “election” occurs only on Election Day. Hurley rejected that claim outright. He noted that more than one million Virginians had already cast ballots in the 2025 House of Delegates elections before lawmakers voted on the amendment.
To treat the election as occurring only on November 4, 2025, he wrote, would effectively disenfranchise those voters. Early voting, the court made clear, is part of the election, not a procedural afterthought.
Compounding the problem, the court found that lawmakers failed to comply with state law requiring proposed constitutional amendments to be publicly posted and published ahead of the next election. Because those notice requirements were not met, votes cast during the 2026 regular session could not count as the constitutionally required second approval. Without that compliance, the amendment process collapsed entirely.
Hurley issued both temporary and permanent injunctions barring any further action on the proposal. The ruling stands as a clear reminder that even politically popular reforms cannot bypass procedural safeguards. In attempting to fast-track redistricting changes, lawmakers overreached—and the court was not willing to look the other way.
