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The glaring error in the Virginia Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision

The court buried itself in dictionaries and missed the obvious.

By a 4-3 vote, the Virginia Supreme Court just struck down that state’s recently enacted congressional maps, which were intended to give Democrats four additional seats in the state’s congressional election after the upcoming midterms. The state enacted these new maps to cancel out Republican gerrymanders in Texas and other red states.

Both the majority opinion and the dissent in Scott v. McDougle hyperfixate on the meaning of the word “election” in the Virginia state constitution, and neither opinion is particularly persuasive. Both sides are able to cite a raft of dictionaries, historical sources, past precedents, and other sources that support their preferred definition of this word.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Textualism, in other words, contributes very little to the dispute in Scott. Both the majority and the dissent are able to identify more than enough textual evidence to make a plausible argument.

Rather than producing two eye-glazing opinions fighting over the meaning of a word whose definition appears to shift depending on both linguistic........

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