The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that a lawsuit challenging Virginia’s felony disenfranchisement law has merit and can proceed. The ACLU of Virginia, WilmerHale, and Protect Democracy filed the suit last year on behalf of individual Virginians, who are currently disqualified from voting under Virginia law despite having served their time in prison, as well as Bridging the Gap in Virginia, a Virginia-based organization that provides reentry support for the formerly incarcerated.
The first-of-its-kind suit claims that Virginia’s permanent disenfranchisement for all felonies violates the Virginia Readmission Act—one of several federal laws passed during Reconstruction that prohibited former Confederate states from depriving their citizens of the right to vote except as punishment for a narrow set of felonies.
After the Civil War, Virginia and other Southern states changed their laws to prevent newly freed Black voters from casting their votes. They did so, in part, by manipulating their criminal codes to expand the types of crimes that triggered disenfranchisement with the specific intent to strip Black people of their voting rights. Today, as a direct consequence, over 300,000 Virginians are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. This has had the greatest impact on Black Virginians, who make up less than 20 percent of Virginia’s voting-age population, yet account for nearly half of Virginians who are disenfranchised due to felony convictions.
The Court’s decision allows the individual Plaintiffs’ claims under the Virginia Readmission Act to proceed; the Court dismissed Plaintiffs’ separate claims under the Eighth Amendment and Section 1983. The Court also dismissed organizational Plaintiff Bridging the Gap from the case.