Three Virginia citizens disqualified from voting due to felony convictions joined a nonprofit organization to file a lawsuit Monday in federal court against Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and several state elections officials. The action challenges the felony disenfranchisement provision of the Virginia Constitution.

The plaintiffs filed the case, King v. Youngkin, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The case concerns a provision of the state constitution that automatically disenfranchises a person with any felony conviction. The plaintiffs allege that this provision violates the Virginia Readmission Act, a law passed in 1870 alongside a series of statutes to readmit representatives from former Confederate states to Congress. In order to regain their representation, however, the states were required to ratify the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment and ensure voting rights to newly emancipated Black citizens. The law further states:

That the State of Virginia is admitted to representation in Congress as one of the States of the Union upon the following fundamental conditions: First, That the Constitution of Virginia 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, whereof they shall have been duly convicted under laws equally applicable to all the inhabitants of said State.

However, Virginia amended its constitution a few years later to include the felony disenfranchisement provision. Essentially, the plaintiffs argue that the state’s current constitution violates the Virginia Readmission Act since it disenfranchises people convicted of any felony, instead of only those acts considered felonies under common law.

According to the complaint, only nine crimes were considered felonies under Virginia common law in 1870. Included among those felonies were murder, manslaughter, arson, burglary, robbery, rape, sodomy, mayhem and larceny. The plaintiffs all have felony convictions related to drug crimes and uttering, neither of which are common law felonies.

The suit also describes the weight of the issue and its pervasiveness among Virginians. It reads:

Virginia is one of only three states whose constitution permanently strips citizens with any felony conviction of their right to vote absent the governor’s restoration of voting rights. And of those three states, Virginia is the only state that does not currently have any automatic process for restoring voting rights. As a result, an estimated 312,540 Virginians are disenfranchised, rendering Virginia the state with the fifth highest number of citizens disenfranchised for felony convictions, and the sixth highest rate of disenfranchisement.

The suit was filed at a time when stakeholders across the nation share similar concerns over voting rights. Recently, litigation has been brought against an Idaho law that banned student ID cards as an adequate form of voter identification. Additionally, the US Supreme Court ordered both Alabama and Louisiana to redraw congressional maps found to politically favor one party over the other.