The Supreme Court on June 23 rejected Virginia’s request to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the state’s lifetime voting ban on convicted felons.

The new order in O’Bannon v. King was an unsigned order. No justices dissented. The court did not explain its decision.

The petitioner, John O’Bannon, who is chairman of the State Board of Elections, was sued in his official capacity. The respondents, Tati Abu King and Toni Heath Johnson, are convicted felons barred by Virginia law from voting. They are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal entities.

King was convicted in 1988 of felony-level robbery. A governor restored his voting rights in 2016, but two years later, he was convicted of felony-level marijuana possession with intent to distribute, according to the state’s petition.

Johnson was convicted of several felony-level crimes, including uttering in 1984, forgery in 1988, uttering a forged check in 1988, credit card theft in 1991, bigamy in 1999, identity fraud in 2002, and grand larceny in 2003. A governor restored her voting rights on an unspecified date, and then in 2021, she was convicted of felony-level drug possession and abuse and neglect of a child, the petition said.

The petition said King and Johnson sued the state in a class action in 2023, under the Supreme Court’s 1908 decision in Ex parte Young and 42 U.S. Code, Section 1983, a federal statute that allows individuals to sue governments for civil rights violations.

Ex parte Young created an exception to the 11th Amendment, which gives states sovereign immunity from lawsuits and permits litigants to sue state officials in federal court to prevent those officials from violating a federal law.

They alleged that Virginia’s 1971 Constitution conflicts with the Virginia Readmission Act, a federal law that permitted the state to rejoin the Union following the Civil War but imposed specific conditions on voting rights within the state.

The plaintiffs argued that the Virginia Readmission Act allows Virginia to disenfranchise only felons convicted of a crime that was a felony “at common law” as of 1870. They said the only common law felonies at the time were murder, manslaughter, burglary, arson, robbery, sodomy, rape, mayhem, and larceny.

They asked a federal district court to block the state “from enforcing Article II, Section 1 of the [current] Virginia Constitution” against Virginians “convicted of crimes that were not felonies at common law” as of 1870.

The court threw out the claim under Section 1983, reasoning that the Virginia Readmission Act “does not create a private right enforceable by an individual civil litigant” because the act “functions to impose conditions upon which Virginia legislators could participate in Congress, and it lacks language that explicitly confers any individual rights,” according to the petition.

However, the court found that the lawsuit could proceed under Ex parte Young.

The state appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which held that the Virginia Readmission Act did not prevent private judicial enforcement and that Ex parte Young allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

The petition, which was filed by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, urged the Supreme Court to take up the case because the issue of whether the Virginia Readmission Act was “judicially enforceable through private suits is … an exceptionally important question of federal law.”

“No court has enforced a Readmission Act against a State in the 150 years since Congress adopted them,” the petition said. “Respondents’ interpretation would be a radical change in the law and would raise a gravely serious question whether the Readmission Acts are unconstitutional.”

King and Johnson filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging it not to hear the state’s appeal.

Congress passed the Virginia Readmission Act “as a reaction to the real risk that Virginia could backslide in its commitment to equal voting rights and re-engage in the subterfuges it carried out in the years leading up to the Act’s passage.”

The law may be enforced and should be, “whatever the political consequences,” the brief said.

“If courts are to respect the conditions Congress placed on Virginia’s readmission to Congress, they must enforce them.”

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 23, 2025, in The Epoch Times.