Voters misled by wording of proposed amendment

If you value your right to cast the informed vote guaranteed by the Virginia Constitution, then the following bizarre theory of my own party’s top officials should concern not merely thoughtful Democrats but Republicans, independents and others.

Texas billionaires are pumping enormous funds through their favorite front groups to get Virginians to vote in favor of the redistricting referendum (Amendment 1) on the ballot this year. The referendum’s wording is self-evidently riddled with deceptive material omissions.

When I brought this to the attention of Attorney General Mark Herring and his top lawyers, along with Democratic and Republican leaders, no one disagreed with me. Indeed, Herring, in writing, further admitted the overwhelming majority of Virginians voting to support the referendum will do so without learning the following truths.

According to Herring and the General Assembly, legislators are granted by the Virginia Constitution the unfettered right to use any descriptive language — even if knowingly deceptive and inaccurate — when writing a ballot referendum. No previous attorney general or General Assembly has ever claimed lawmakers can so brazenly manipulate voters into backing their proposed constitutional changes.

The result: Texas billionaires and other mega-donors first pressured the General Assembly through front groups to pass the amendments and now are writing $250,000 checks for misleading advertisements getting unsuspecting Virginians to vote for the referendum. They claim they only want to bring good government to Virginia, but here are the facts.

The General Assembly is proposing two constitutional amendments about redistricting. One adds new criteria for drawing Senate and House districts, the second creates a new commission to draw the district lines using such criteria. Proposed amendments must be approved in a statewide referendum. If passed, all the proposed changes, even those not seen and thus unknown to unsuspecting voters, are automatically added to the Constitution. Voters therefore assume the ballot description is a fair and accurate summary of all the key provisions.

The full referendum wording reads: “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to establish a redistricting commission, consisting of eight members of the General Assembly and eight citizens of the commonwealth, that is responsible for drawing the congressional and state legislative districts that will be subsequently voted on, but not changed by, the General Assembly and enacted without the governor’s involvement and to give the responsibility of drawing districts to the Supreme Court of Virginia if the redistricting commission fails to draw districts or the General Assembly fails to enact districts by certain deadlines?”

Notice not even the slightest hint of the proposed criteria changes. A total omission has never been condoned in the previous nearly seven dozen referendums over almost100 years. In addition, there is no mention that the “citizen” members are not independents but rather must be approved by at least one top partisan Democratic or Republican leader in the General Assembly, nor that three partisan legislators of any party can unite to block the entire work of the other13 commission members due to an unstated supermajority requirement, nor that the proposed change violates the separation of powers doctrine in our legal system.

To repeat: Such brazen manipulation has never been permitted, much less endorsed by the attorney general and the General Assembly.

I was the first Virginia Democratic Party chair in history to demand redistricting be legally fair to all citizens and communities: and then worked with Gov. Doug Wilder to make it happen. Yes, we need more reform. But condoning an “ends justify the means” theory of government manipulation is not the solution.

Polls show respect for the law dwindling. Telling Virginians their elected representatives have the right to deceive them because “government legislators know best” is among the worst possible messages right now.