The Daily Signal - Redistricting in a Rush: What Virginia Voters Need To Know | Joe Thomas

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Redistricting, you hear the most outrageous lies. Apologies to the writers of the movie Repo Man, the goggle box do-gooderers that are out there trying to tell you where and what is really going on in Virginia redistricting are trying to get you to vote for it probably in middle April. They need to have this vote cast by the middle of April so that there is time if they do succeed in convincing you to overturn an election that went down 65% in favor of a nonpartisan redistricting commission that each 10 years would redraw Virginia's districts based on population shifts. tear that up in favor of a reactionary bill that would allow them, if another state changed their districts, Virginia could invoke this constitutional amendment to recreate theirs.

Starting point is 00:01:35 So that's what's going on here in Virginia. And just as a quick note, this is what it looks like nationwide. When you look at the states that are discussing whether or not to redress, You're looking at certainly Texas, the beginning of all of this, but a reminder about Texas. This was court-ordered redistricting because it had been determined that Texas's districts were drawn racially biased, and you're not allowed to do that. Then California said, well, if they're going to redistrict, then we're going to redistrict. And you can see on the map how few Republican places there are in California, and they're trying to make that even fewer.

Starting point is 00:02:16 Then you have Illinois, J.B. Pritzker there, Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Kansas, Utah, got into it, North Carolina, and even New York State is talking about redistricting their congressional districts ahead of the midterms. Now, unlike all those other states, Virginia had a constitutional amendment that said you can't do it. actually, I believe New York has a constitutional amendment, but their process for changing a constitutional amendment is much less stringent. Now, what's happened in Virginia is that they've pulled some rabbits out of the hat. In Virginia, the law says that in order to amend the Virginia constitution, you have to pass the amendment through both the House and Senate. Governors not involved in it. Then that has to sit for at minimum two years for at least one of the houses to all pass through an election cycle. That would have been last November for the House. However,

Starting point is 00:03:27 then it has to pass another general assembly session and then be brought to the voters. What happened was because there was a special session invoked by Governor Junkin to amend the Virginia budget, Speaker Don Scott used the parliamentary procedure to convene another meeting of that same special session in December to pass the constitutional amendment for a second time just days before the culmination of Virginia's 2025 election cycle. The debate is, and there are court proceedings that are going to proceed both on whether or not the ensuing vote for the constitutional amendment can take place and whether or not 45 days of election is the election or if it is only on election day. The argument being on one side that 45 days, which is how

Starting point is 00:04:31 long Virginians have to vote absentee in person or by mail, constitutes the totality of the election, or if since the ballots, according to those on the left, aren't tabulated until election day, that all those days prior to election day are just early opportunities to place your ballot in the hands of someone who isn't going to count it until election. day. That's the debate that is going to be brought into some Virginia courts over the next few weeks, as well as the question as to whether it is legal to force a clerk of your county or my county to have a special election in April if they haven't had the sufficient time in advance to post the constitutional amendment for you to read it. I know start to get a little

Starting point is 00:05:27 glassy-eyed when you talk about all these lawyers and all these laws. But these are the ways that Virginia's constitution is supposed to protect you from rapid and ramrodded legislations. So let's look at what they're proposing to do. This is Virginia's congressional district map of right now. Right now, I think we are six, six, seven Democrat represented districts and four Republican represented districts. districts and you can see where they are, the sixth and the first and down through the second and the third. So what do they want it to wind up looking like? This is one of the proposed bills. Now, the folks in Louise Lucas's party will tell you there are no final, even though she

Starting point is 00:06:21 has tweeted out some of these pictures under the hashtag 10 to 1, because that's what they want. They want to create 10 reliably blue congressional districts and only one here in Southside as a Republican majority district. So how do they determine that? Well, this is a graph that we've taken from the Virginia Public Access Project, and this shows you how Virginia's congressional districts voted. How do you get to where 10 districts would be Democrat majority? First, you take the red districts and you drag them towards where they become more blue. That would be congressional districts nine and six and five. And then you take these blue districts that if you can look,

Starting point is 00:07:25 at the distance they are 40% plus Democrat, Congressional District 8, Congressional District 13, and three and four are all 20% or more Democrat support. You take those districts and you stretch them all the way out until they reach as far west as you can. Because if you look at where we are currently, you'll see that the blue districts here in the 10th and 11th, the first, they're all along what they call the blue crescent in Virginia, that going from the Washington, D.C. suburbs all the way down into Hampton Roads. So what they want to do then is take that and turn it into this by stretching all of those districts that are 20% or more Democrat into the areas that are Republican.

Starting point is 00:08:33 Now, the hard part about this is that when you talk about this, it would be easy in a state like New York where citizens register to vote. under a particular political party. In Virginia, we're very proud of the fact that we do not register by party. So how do you know? How do they know these numbers? How does the VPAP people, how do they figure this? If we don't register by party, how do you know that a congressional district 11 is 25% Democrat majority?

Starting point is 00:09:13 How do you know that? Well, it's simply by election results. What they do is they take historical election results and tabulate them together, and then they come up with an average. The thing is, on average, Virginia's elections see somewhere between 53 and 57% voter turnout. So what they're going to do with these districts is they're going to take these, 20 and 40% Democrat districts by election results, stretch them to the point of breaking, stretch them to the point where they're going to be right at the edge of being maybe 52%,

Starting point is 00:10:03 maybe 53% Democrats by election results historically. And stop, not go any further. The peril in this, as I see it, is that you have now created an opportunity where a district, nobody would have ever said, hey, maybe we can win this district as a Republican with a voter turnout game. Now you're in the game. If you can bring out the 40% odd that don't turn out, some of them are Republicans. And that's the peril in this, is that by doing this, they're putting themselves in a position of taking all of those safe districts along the blue crescent from northern Virginia

Starting point is 00:10:53 down through Hampton Roads, the first and the third, and stretching them to the point of them being perilously close to a 50-50 split just to be able to say, well, it's a 52% Democrat majority. But again, doing the arithmetic to it is that these are based on purely election results. And if given this scenario, a motivated Republican voter base could easily turn this 10 to one scenario on its head. But that's how it's all going to roll out. And the questions, the legal questions will first be borne out before April comes along when this will come to a special election near you. Another quick point, historically, elections have not seen very high voter turnout. So it'll be incumbent on both political parties to get

Starting point is 00:11:54 their voters motivated to vote in a time when a lot of other things are going on in April. But they'll have to do it then in order to have this election completed in time for the redrawing of the districts so that they can have them in place by the time the famous midterm elections come along. I'm sure this is now just as clear as mud to you, but that's the plan. As it is passed before the General Assembly was two days old, the plan is now in place, and it will be coming to the voters, whether or not there is a court case that has heard. Now that there is legislation, the Virginia Supreme Court will hear these cases, whether or not the clerks can be forced to conduct a special election for a constitutional amendment that they won't have the time

Starting point is 00:12:55 to sufficiently post for the 90-day period before the special election. And if that isn't enough, the question as to whether the chicanery that went on around how to create a special session of the General Assembly in order to consider whether or not November of 2025, was the intervening election, which is what Virginia law mandates, is that there has to be an intervening election, or in the fact that the special session of the General Assembly happened 42 days into a 45-day voting cycle, whether that counted or not. So those are going to be two very big court rulings in this before we ever get to April. Hopefully, that has made it make a little bit more sense to you. email your delegates and your state senators and you can always send me an email as well here at the

Starting point is 00:13:56 Daily Signal.

The Daily Signal - Redistricting in a Rush: What Virginia Voters Need To Know | Joe Thomas

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