Virginia voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday allowing the state legislature to redraw congressional district maps, overriding a nonpartisan independent redistricting process that two-thirds of Virginia voters had themselves approved by referendum in 2020. The amendment passed despite former Governor Glenn Youngkin warning it would be close and campaigning against it, and despite former President Obama personally backing the initiative.
John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment and contributor to PowerLineBlog.com, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what the Virginia outcome means in the broader context of election integrity and the upcoming midterm elections.
Hinderaker said he was genuinely surprised the vote was as close as it was, with the amendment passing by only about three points despite Barack Obama’s active campaigning for it and Virginia’s sustained trend toward Democratic dominance. He noted the ballot language framing the initiative, which described converting what analysts assess as the fairest congressional map in America into one of the most gerrymandered by asking voters whether they wished to restore fairness. That framing, which the Democratic majority in the legislature authored, was precisely what allowed the amendment to pass at all, he said. The current map produces a six-to-five Democratic advantage in the congressional delegation, which he acknowledged he does not love but which independent analysts have consistently rated as among the most proportional in the country. The proposed replacement would dramatically expand the Democratic advantage in ways the ballot language deliberately obscured.
He placed the Virginia development within what he described as an accelerating national pattern of the left using procedural and legal mechanisms to entrench electoral advantages, including the 2016 creation of Eric Holder’s Democratic redistricting operation, aggressive gerrymandering in New York and California, and now Virginia. Republican states including Texas have begun gerrymandering in response, which Hinderaker said he understands as a matter of self-defense but views with concern as part of a broader breakdown of the shared rules framework that makes self-governance coherent. He said if one side cannot play by honest rules, the basis for common citizenship between left and right becomes increasingly difficult to articulate, and that the country is seeing a real movement toward political disunion that has been building for some time.
Proft raised a congressional exchange between Wisconsin Representative Bryan Steil and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon about the mechanics of voting in Minnesota that illustrates the election integrity vulnerabilities at stake. Simon confirmed that Minnesota issues driver’s licenses to non-citizens including undocumented immigrants, that those licenses do not indicate citizenship status, that same-day voter registration is permitted without a photo ID requirement, and that a person arriving at a polling place on election day can register and receive a ballot by simply asserting residency in the precinct. An additional provision allows one person to vouch for multiple others in a precinct, a mechanism Hinderaker said Democratic organizations have been known to exploit by stationing vouchers at polling places. He said the system is genuinely corrupt, and that voters in states with honest election administration look at what happens in Minnesota and reasonably conclude their own votes are being diluted by fraud perpetrated elsewhere.
On Minnesota’s political competitiveness, Hinderaker said the state is much closer than national perception suggests, with the state House currently deadlocked at sixty-seven to sixty-seven and the Senate at thirty-four to thirty-three in favor of Democrats. He said given the ballot integrity regime he just described, getting to mathematical near-parity is itself remarkable and reflects genuine public appetite for change that is being suppressed by procedural advantages rather than by actual voter preferences.
He said the most significant development heading into the midterms will be a new wave of fraud indictments coming out of Minnesota, likely beginning sometime between now and early summer. The Feeding Our Future food program fraud, which produced approximately five hundred million dollars in criminal theft, ninety indictments, and sixty-five convictions, represented the first major wave of accountability. The FBI and the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota have since been investigating fraud across fourteen separate Medicaid programs and have concluded that there are billions of additional dollars in criminality in those programs. Hinderaker said he has been told indictments are being prepared and that a new, larger wave of prosecutions will generate significant public attention before voters go to the polls in November.
On Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s decision to issue arrest warrants for ICE officers enforcing federal immigration law, Hinderaker said she ran for office on an explicit soft-on-crime platform and has been true to her word throughout four years that have produced a documented surge in crime in Hennepin County. He said she is not seeking reelection, making the ICE arrest warrants something of a swan song, and that the voters of Hennepin County have effectively rendered their judgment on her tenure by making clear she cannot win another term. He said his organization has been part of the effort to document and publicize the consequences of her approach to prosecution, and called her decision not to seek reelection an encouraging sign that the political costs of radical criminal justice policy are finally becoming visible in the voting data.