Virginia Democrats flub petition to Supreme Court with wrong address

Days after submitting a petition to the Supreme Court riddled with typos in their attempt to restore a distorted congressional map, Virginia Democrats filed a new petition with the high court — this time with an even more serious error.

Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn last week’s ruling by the state Supreme Court that invalidated the Democrats’ map because the Legislature violated procedural rules in putting it to voters.

The emergency petition, however, was mistakenly sent to the Virginia Supreme Court.

The error followed an earlier version of the motion that misspelled “Virginia” and “senator.” In the filing sent to the high court on Monday, “Virginia” is once again misspelled, but only on page 53.

The new error drew sarcastic criticism from state Republicans, who were already destroying the Hail Mary party’s attempt to get the Supreme Court to revive their gerrymander map.

“Good news: Democrats got Virginia spelled correctly,” said Jason Miyares, a former state attorney general and Republican. “Bad news: They sent their emergency SCOTUS request to the wrong court. Baby steps.”

Virginia Democrats mislabeled the motion as they rushed to try to restore their partisan map, which was narrowly approved in the April 22 referendum.

Had the Virginia Supreme Court not defeated the map, it would have skewed the state’s congressional districts toward Democrats by a 10-to-1 margin, meaning only one congressional district likely would have voted for a Republican candidate in November. Democrats were on track to pick up four additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in the hotly contested battle for control of Congress.

Now that map has been abandoned and the current Congressional map is valid. That would likely give Democrats six congressional seats and Republicans five in the November election.

The trial is one of several last-ditch ideas floated by Democrats in the wake of last week’s ruling.

Another idea was for the Legislature to impose a new, lower mandatory retirement age on the state Supreme Court, which would automatically oust members who voted against the map and give Democrats in the legislature a chance to fill those seats and get a new ruling.

In addition to turning a political war into a nuclear attack, the idea would also test the state’s calendar, which calls for primaries in August, with early voting beginning as early as June 18.

Election administrators must finalize those ballots by May 28, Mr. Jones told the justices.

“This court should not allow the Virginia Supreme Court to short-circuit this process by overturning the Commonwealth’s legally adopted maps at the last minute,” he wrote.

The majority of the Virginia Supreme Court, in its decision last week, emphasized that it was Mr. Jones himself who caused the lack of time. He had urged the state court to wait until after the April 21 referendum before issuing its decision.