I usually aim to offer immediate commentary on important new court decisions involving elections. But after the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the new voter-approved congressional map, I needed to take a few days to digest it. Unlike most of the other cases I write about, this one was personal — but not in the usual way.

I am often involved in the briefing and arguing of high-profile election cases. This time I was not. Instead, this case is personal because I was one of the 3 million voters disenfranchised by the decision.

On the final Saturday before the election, I cast a ballot in favor of the measure allowing a new map. And when I heard about the decision, my first reaction was that something was stolen from me — as a voter.

This is an unfamiliar role for me. I have never had my vote challenged nor been forced to vote provisionally. I have never suffered from a voter purge nor had a ballot rejected.

I am usually the lawyer fighting for other people's right to vote. But in this instance, it was my vote that was in the hands of other lawyers.

This was not easy for me. I had been represented by lawyers before and found deferring to their advice easy. But here, I wasn't even a client — just a voter. I had no say over what happened to my most precious right as a citizen.

In that capacity, I felt this was an easy case.

Several Republican states had gerrymandered their own maps to increase the chances that Republicans could keep control of Congress, even though they are deeply unpopular. The elected leadership in Virginia wanted to help offset these gerrymanders by redrawing its own map to favor Democrats — a legal and democratic response to the GOP’s attacks elsewhere.

Virginia held a special election to consider a change to the state constitution that would allow mid-decade redistricting. Voters voted, ballots were counted, and the amendment passed.

Republicans, unhappy with this result, sued. Eventually, the case made its way to the state's highest court. And, after hearing the arguments, the court agreed with the GOP's technical arguments and threw out the entire election — and my vote along with it.

As a voting rights lawyer, I was struck by how this decision completely ignored the Due Process rights of voters. Just months earlier, in a mail ballot case involving Republican Congressman Michael Bost, the U.S. Supreme Court warned of "dire" "democratic consequences" if courts intervene only after votes have been counted.

Quoting Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion during the Bush v. Gore litigation, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the conservative majority that "count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires."

Yet that is exactly what the Virginia Supreme Court did here. It permitted the casting and counting of ballots only to step in and rule on the legality of the election afterward.

The result has been the exact loss of confidence in democracy that the U.S. Supreme Court warned of. What I felt as a voter — that something had been taken from me — is exactly what the conservative Supreme Court highlighted in its decision in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections.

Opponents of the map will argue the court was simply correcting a procedural defect — that this was a technical legal matter, not an attack on voters. But that framing misses the point entirely. When a court waits for 3 million people to cast ballots and then voids the election, the procedural defect becomes a democratic one. The harm is not to a statute but to the rights of voters and democracy.

In the last few days, we have seen the consequences of this reckless act. A furious Virginia public is now considering alternative solutions — such as adding justices, ignoring the ruling or restructuring the court entirely. Just as the conservative Supreme Court majority predicted, the result of pulling the rug out from under voters is democratic instability.

Reading the opinion, it is clear that the Virginia Supreme Court majority knew this was a potential weakness. It noted that lawyers backing the redraw had argued to the court before the election that state precedent required the election to move forward while litigation was taking place. The majority points to concessions at oral argument — by the lawyer arguing to uphold the election — that the court was free to discard its results.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the rights of voters and the impact on election integrity and democratic stability. This is not an ordinary private dispute among parties to a contract, where one side can waive its rights to make future legal arguments. The harm articulated by Chief Justice Roberts is to the entire system of elections and the voters who participate in them.

No matter what the parties to the case argued, the Virginia court had an independent obligation to safeguard the rights of voters. Regardless of what any lawyer said, the court's paramount responsibility was to the due process rights of 3 million Virginians.

The system failed those voters. I was one of those voters. The system failed me.

Sitting on this side of a case, I have learned the intense impact disenfranchisement has on someone who seeks to be an engaged citizen. It is demoralizing to have done everything right — to show up, to vote — only to have a court strip that away in favor of rules and technicalities that disregarded the voters entirely.

I am still working through what specific reforms I support for the Virginia court system. But I know this: the court failed voters and democracy, and Virginia must take meaningful steps to ensure it never happens again. Those 3 million voters — and every voter who comes after them — deserve nothing less.