Several advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit Monday alleging a Virginia law that automatically stripped the right to vote from more than 300,000 convicted felons is an illegal vestige of historical efforts to keep Black residents from casting ballots.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Virginia, the voting rights group Protect Democracy and the law firm WilmerHale sued Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and other state officials, asserting that the law violates the 150-year-old terms of Virginia’s readmission into the Union after the Civil War.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three disenfranchised felons in Alexandria, the Charlottesville area and the southwest part of the state, as well as Bridging the Gap, a nonprofit organization that helps formerly incarcerated people.
Virginia is one of only three states with constitutions that automatically disenfranchise all people with felony convictions, unless the governor restores the person’s right to vote, according to the lawsuit. Virginia is the only state that requires felons to individually petition the governor to restore that right.
The Virginia Readmission Act, which reestablished the state’s representation in Congress in 1870, prohibited Virginia from disenfranchising its citizens for any crimes other than those that are “now felonies at common law,” according to the lawsuit. At the time, those were a handful of mostly violent crimes such as murder, rape, arson and burglary.
But Virginia later amended its constitution to bar all convicted felons from going to the polls, putting it in conflict with the Readmission Act, the lawsuit claims.
Rachel Homer, counsel for Protect Democracy, said the federal government specifically limited the number of crimes for which Virginia and other former Confederate states could limit the right to vote because of a pattern of legal discrimination taking place in those states.
“The purpose was these states were using criminal law to disenfranchise the newly freed Black citizens of those states,” Homer said. “Those states were using their criminal law intentionally to limit the power of Black citizens.”