CNN Legal Expert Warns Democrats Their Virginia Gerrymander Is in Big Trouble

Elie Honig warned that Democrats’ effort to push a partisan gerrymander of Virginia through the state legislature is in big trouble during a Thursday afternoon segment on CNN News Central.

After noting that a judge had blocked the implementation of the Democrats’ preferred map one day after Virginians voted to allow the legislature to do so and that Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones (D) plans to appeal, anchors Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar asked Honig, “Do you think this challenge in Virginia has a chance of succeeding?”

“I do think it has a chance of success — this battle is not over,” replied Honig. “So, if you look at there are various challenges here brought by the RNC and other Republican entities, they’re basically making two types of challenges here. One is substantive, so they’re arguing that the way the question was phrased on the ballot was unfair, was misleading. And there is some legitimacy to that. I mean, the question asks, do you want to, quote, ‘restore fairness to the process?’ Who’s going to realistically vote no on that? I mean, a lot of people did, but it’s slanted, I don’t know if it’s slanted enough to win the legal challenge. But the second category is the procedural challenges. And that’s where I think the challengers have some real heft behind their arguments”

“For example,” he continued, “One of the laws says, if you’re going to do this, the Virginia general assembly has to pass a law, and then voting, the referendum, can’t start for 90 days after the law is passed. Here, we’re not even 90 days out now, and the voting’s done. So I don’t know how Virginia’s going to defend that. There’s another procedural quirk, I guess, that says, the way you have to do this is the Virginia general assembly has to pass a law, then you need to have an intervening election. Then a second general assembly needs to pass the law again. And the argument here that you’re hearing from the defenders is, ‘Well, the 2025 governor election, that’s the intervening election.’ The problem is that overlapped with the first vote so there’s some procedural nuance here that I think is going to be a real problem for people defending this outcome, and I think it’s going to give the Republicans a chance to actually get it knocked down on the legal challenges.”

Later, Honig argued that “the extremity of this redistricting, the fact that you have a state that’s roughly 50-50, a little bit Democratic-leaning, ends up with a 10-to-1 congressional split” could also imperil the new map.

“I don’t know how that’s going to sit when it gets up the line in the courts. It’s not technically legally relevant, but I think the extremity of this is going to be something that judges do take notice of,” said Honig.

Watch above via CNN.

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