AOC is close, but not quite right — and the truth is troubling enough that we don't need to overstate it.

I live in Virginia, am a reporter in Virginia and voted. Here is what actually happened.

On April 21st, Virginia held a special referendum on whether the General Assembly should be temporarily empowered to redraw the state's congressional districts. It passed — narrowly, 52 to 48, but it passed.

Yesterday, in a 4-to-3 ruling, the court struck down the referendum on procedural grounds. Not because the map was unfair or voters were misled. But because the legislature took its first vote on October 31st, after early voting had already opened — and the majority ruled that the "general election" begins not on Election Day but when early voting opens. On that basis, the entire process was deemed fatally compromised.

Here is what that ruling was not, however: settled law. The dissent was written by Chief Justice Cleo Powell, the most senior judge on the court. She argued that early voting windows shift year to year, are set administratively rather than constitutionally, and give a legislature no reliable date to track. Her conclusion: the majority had made constitutional compliance a matter of luck rather than principle, creating what she called "an infinite voting loop with no established beginning."

That is the Chief Justice of the Virginia Supreme Court saying the majority got it wrong. Many legal scholars agreed.

So here is what was voided last Friday: a statewide vote in which a majority of Virginians said yes, at a cost of $5.2 million in public funds and nearly $100 million in advocacy spending from both sides. Not because voters did anything wrong or the map was unconstitutional. But because of a procedural vote taken four days after early voting opened, which four judges decided was four days too late.

So this is not an overturned election. But a voided vote. And on a 4-to-3 ruling with the Chief Justice in dissent, that is troubling enough to say plainly.