The Virginia commission missed a required deadline to approve new state and federal legislative maps on Sunday, in large part due to a breakdown in trust among the bipartisan commission’s members. With the Republican Party bent on using the status quo for maximal gain and a Supreme Court that is unwilling to stop them, Democrats must rethink whether electoral fairness can be achieved with redistricting at all-and what the alternative could look like. The problem is that only one political party is now generally faithful to the idea that elections should be open and competitive, with voters choosing their representatives instead of the other way around. Many states adopted bipartisan redistricting commissions and other anti-gerrymandering reforms in the hope that they would lead to more equitable electoral systems. Though well intentioned, that effort to end partisan gerrymandering and ensure fair maps appears to have failed, in Virginia and beyond. Instead of leaving it up to state lawmakers to draw new legislative maps for state and federal seats every decade, the amendment transferred that power to a bipartisan commission of regular citizens and state legislators.
Last year, voters in Virginia adopted a constitutional amendment to reform the state’s redistricting process ahead of the 2020 census.
