Washington (United States) (AFP) – US President Donald Trump on Wednesday alleged a vote in which Virginia backed a new electoral map that could favor Democrats was “rigged,” echoing his false claims over the 2020 election.
“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT,” Trump said on social media. “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!'”
The state voted in a referendum Tuesday to allow the redrawing of the congressional map, giving Democrats a strong advantage in 10 of the state’s 11 House districts, up from their previous 6-5 edge. The temporary map is the latest instance of “gerrymandering,” the long-established but widely criticized US practice of drawing electoral boundaries to benefit one party. Gerrymandering has become a defining element in November’s midterm elections, in which all US House Representatives and one-third of Senators are on the ballot.
Redistricting usually follows the US national census every 10 years, but Trump last year urged Republican-led states to redraw maps mid-decade to protect the party’s fragile House of Representatives majority. Texas moved first, adopting a map that could add up to five Republican seats. California answered with a ballot measure designed to give Democrats five more of their own.
Democrats argued that the Virginia map was a necessary counterweight to Trump’s pressure campaign, while Republicans denounced it as a power grab in a state where Trump took 46 percent of the vote in 2024. “Six to five goes to ten to one, and yet the Presidential Election in November was very close to a 50-50 split,” Trump said on Wednesday.
The 79-year-old Republican also criticized the Virginia election as confusing, writing: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive.” In his Truth Social post, Trump expressed hope that the courts would weigh in and block the Virginia redistricting. “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice,'” he said.
Republicans have mounted multiple legal challenges to the redistricting, some of which are still being litigated and may eventually be decided by the Virginia Supreme Court, which ruled previously that the referendum could go ahead. Trump heavily pushed the Texas redistricting effort, which was jammed through by the state legislature without a referendum.
A vocal critic of mail-in voting as a supposed cause of election fraud — despite using it himself — Trump for years has propagated the falsehood to justify his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. No evidence has been produced by any credible authority that the 2020 vote or any other was impacted by cheating.
Trump has been pushing Republicans to pass a sweeping overhaul of voting rules before November’s midterm elections called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The bill, which has already passed the House, faces steep obstacles in the Senate, where Republicans lack the votes to overcome Democratic opposition.
© 2024 AFP
