Court Ruling Gives Green Light to Proceed for Lawsuit Challenging Voter Suppression in Tennessee

On March 30, 2022, a court ruled that our lawsuit in Tennessee fighting for the voting rights of individuals with felony convictions can move forward.  This lawsuit could restore the right to vote for more than 451,000 Tennesseans with felony records, approximately 9% of the state’s total voting age population.

Equal Justice Under Law, along with several partner organizations, filed this lawsuit in December 2020 to restore voting rights to individuals with felony convictions.  Under Tennessee law, anyone convicted of a felony is stripped of the right to vote. The result of this policy is that more than 9% of the total voting age population of Tennessee – and more than 21% of African-American voting age population – cannot vote.  Tennessee has the second highest rate of disenfranchisement among African-Americans in the United States. In 2010, Tennessee changed its law to guarantee that those who had completed their sentences had their right to vote restored, but the voting rights restoration process created is so convoluted as to make it essentially impossible to regain the right to vote.

Making matters worse, Tennessee’s convoluted voting rights restoration process also erects financial barriers to the right to vote. Tennessee requires individuals to pay off all court costs before they can restore their right to vote, and some counties require payment of a fee to apply for voting rights restoration – a modern-day poll tax. The result is a system of wealth-based discrimination: those with financial means can have their rights restored, but those without cannot.

The state officials we sued filed a motion to dismiss the case, and that motion was denied by Judge William L. Campbell, Jr. of the Middle District of Tennessee Federal District Court.  Defendants moved to dismiss all seven claims in the case, but Judge Campbell only dismissed one claim, giving the green light for the case to proceed ahead to the discovery phase.

Phil Telfeyan, Executive Director of Equal Justice Under Law, stated, “The court’s ruling to deny the state’s motion to dismiss is a critical first step toward restoring Tennesseans’ constitutional right to vote. The state agrees that individuals should regain their right to vote, and our goal is to make that process accessible and fair to all.”