Weeks ahead of high-stakes U.S. midterm elections, former president Donald Trump has reignited his long-running pattern of unsubstantiated election fraud claims by labeling a recent Virginia redistricting referendum a “rigged” process that tilted power toward Democrats.
In a post shared to his Truth Social platform Wednesday, Trump repeated familiar false claims about mail-in voting to back his accusation, writing that Republicans held a clear lead throughout Election Day Tuesday before a last-minute “massive Mail In Ballot Drop” flipped the final result. “A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT,” he wrote, echoing the baseless narrative he pushed to overturn his 2020 presidential loss to Joe Biden.
The referendum in question approved a temporary redrawn congressional district map that analysts project will give Democrats a dominant advantage in 10 of Virginia’s 11 U.S. House seats, up from the party’s prior narrow 6-5 edge. The move is the latest flashpoint in a national battle over gerrymandering, the decades-old but widely criticized practice of manipulating electoral boundaries to benefit the party that controls the map-drawing process. That battle has moved to center stage ahead of November’s midterms, when all 435 House seats and one-third of U.S. Senate seats will be up for election.
Redistricting is typically conducted once every decade following the completion of the U.S. national census, but Trump last year openly urged state legislatures controlled by his Republican Party to redraw district boundaries mid-decade to shore up the party’s narrow House majority. Texas was the first Republican-led state to act, passing a map that could net the party up to five additional House seats. Democratic-controlled California quickly responded with its own ballot initiative to gain five seats for Democratic candidates.
Democrats have defended Virginia’s new map as a necessary countermove to the aggressive redistricting push led by Trump and national Republicans. But Republicans have pushed back hard, framing the referendum outcome as an illegitimate power grab, particularly in a state that Trump won 46% of the vote in 2024. Trump echoed that criticism Wednesday, arguing that the lopsided 10-1 district advantage is out of step with the state’s nearly 50-50 partisan split in presidential voting. He also claimed the language of the referendum ballot was intentionally confusing and misleading to skew turnout.
Trump called on state and federal courts to intervene to block the new map, writing “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’” Republican officials have already filed multiple legal challenges to the redistricting plan, with several cases still pending that could ultimately be decided by the Virginia Supreme Court — which previously ruled the referendum could proceed despite Republican opposition.
Critics have noted that Trump’s push for mid-decade redistricting has been inconsistent: he publicly championed Texas’ new Republican-friendly map, which was passed by the state legislature without any public referendum, while condemning Virginia’s Democratic-backed plan that was put to a direct public vote.
For years, Trump has baselessly claimed that mail-in voting is rife with systemic fraud, even though he and his family have repeatedly voted by mail themselves. No credible election authority or official investigation has ever produced evidence of widespread fraud that impacted the 2020 presidential election or any other recent national U.S. election.
Beyond the redistricting fight, Trump has also pressured congressional Republicans to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, widely known as the SAVE Act, a sweeping overhaul of federal voting rules ahead of the November midterms. The bill has already passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but it faces major roadblocks in the U.S. Senate, where Republicans do not hold enough votes to overcome Democratic opposition to the measure.