Thinking about Elections

GOOD NEWS! I can use a little good news, and this is it. A federal judge has ruled against Virginia’s overly broad felon disenfranchisement laws. This ruling restores voting rights to hundreds of thousands of Virginians.

The ruling is based on Reconstruction-era statutes that placed conditions on readmitting Confederate States back into the Union. The Virginia Readmission Act (1870) mandated that Virginia's constitution could not be amended to disenfranchise citizens except for the narrow list felony offenses recognized in 1870 (i.e. arson, burglary, escaping from prison, larceny, manslaughter, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery, sodomy and suicide.) Yet Virginia weaponized criminal law to disenfranchise blacks Americans beyond what was allowed in the readmission acts. In the century following the Civil War, Virginia greatly expanded the list of conditions and crimes that disenfranchised citizens, such as poll taxes, perjury, forgery, all felonies, drug offenses (which didn’t exist in 1870, but represent about 15% of current and formerly incarcerated Virginians.)

There was a Readmission Act for each state in the Confederacy, but voting rights provisions were unenforced in the former Confederacy. They’ve been relatively unexplored as a way to re-enfranchise former felons, but this Virginia ruling opens the door for disenfranchised voters in other southern states with readmission acts.

About 4 million Americans are denied the vote because of their state’s laws on felony convictions.

https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-says-virginia-violated-reconstruction-era-law-by-disenfranchising-certain-felons/