Democrat Tom Shields challenged Republican incumbent John O’Bannon in the 73rd House of Delegates District. In the weeks prior to Tuesday’s election, yard signs promoting Shields proliferated in the West End. They were impossible to miss along Patterson, Three Chopt, Forest, and other roadways. Their multiplying numbers suggested a competitive race. O’Bannon won in a landslide. It turns out that everyone who voted for Shields must have displayed a sign. Oh well.

Charlie Diradour’s campaign against Rep. Eric Cantor got off to an amusing start when voters learned the Democratic challenger does not live in the 7th Congressional District. Rather, he lives in the 3rd. “I don’t live in the district because they gerrymandered the district 10 years ago,“ he explained. Diradour is correct to cite gerrymandering, but his history seems less than precise. The crucial redistricting occurred after the 1990 Census—almost 20 years ago. The maps reflecting the 2000 Census preserved the previous framework.

The House Privileges and Elections Committee has killed a bill to create a bipartisan redistricting commission. The vote ranks as the most deplorable of the session. Legislation banning smoking in bars tramples on the property rights of restaurant and bar owners, but at least there is a principled argument to be made for such a ban: It protects the public well-being, in the same way that other health and safety regulations protect customers and employees. (The analogy doesn’t fly, but that’s a subject for another day.)

Gov. Tim Kaine is admirably dogged in pursuit of his objectives, from bans on public smoking to no-excuse absentee voting. His persistence on behalf of bipartisan redistricting deserves praise from every fair-minded Virginian. Fair-minded Virginians understand that the longstanding practice of gerrymandering distorts and diminishes democracy. It removes from elections what they must have to mean much of anything: uncertainty. When politicians draw electoral maps to ensure the survival of incumbents and to perpetuate majority-party power, they effectively guarantee the outcome of electoral races before the first vote is ever cast.

Tuesday saw two special elections to fill vacancies in the House of Delegates. To tell the truth, the contests barely qualified as elections and certainly not as special.