This is a fascinating challenge to Virginia’s felon disenfranchisement law on the grounds that it violates the fundamental conditions placed on its 1870 re-admission to the Union. The Court’s docket can be found here. At this stage of the case, the questions presented read more like a Fed Courts exam than an election law one. A response was requested by the Court, but that is the norm when a State petitions for cert.

Matt Ford at The New Republic:

It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction. The American constitutional order went through more changes during those two decades than in the other 230 years of its existence combined. Now the Supreme Court may soon have another opportunity to revisit their contested aftermath.

A group of Virginia election officials asked the justices last month to effectively nullify one of the Reconstruction-era laws that set the terms for the state’s postwar readmission to the Union. In doing so, they hope to maintain a strict regime of disenfranchising Virginians with felony convictions that the Reconstruction-era Congress sought to prevent. Should the justices let the lower court’s decision stand, it could breathe new life to a long-forgotten congressional effort to protect multiracial democracy in the South.

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Most importantly, at least for this lawsuit, the Virginia Readmission Act required that Virginia’s state constitution “shall never be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the right to vote by the Constitution herein recognized, except as a punishment for such crimes as are now felonies at common law.” To that end, the state’s 1870 constitution only disenfranchised Virginians for a handful of specific high crimes like bribery, embezzlement, and treason, in addition to other common-law felonies.