Robinson challenged the congressional map that Louisiana enacted after the 2020 Census. ACLU and partners represented Plaintiffs the Louisiana State Conference of the NAACP, Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, and several impacted voters, and argued that the enacted plan violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In June 2022, the district court found Louisiana’s congressional map unlawfully denied Black voters a second district in which Black voters had an equal opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. After appeals, the legislature passed a new map containing two majority Black districts in January 2024.

Texas requires voters who register to vote electronically or via fax to mail an original copy with the voter’s “wet signature” to the applicable registrar. A voter may be denied registration merely because the mailed copy of the form has a scanned signature on it rather than a “wet ink” one. But the Civil Rights Act prohibits states from disenfranchising voters based on immaterial paperwork errors. We’re fighting to make sure that every vote counts and supported Vote.org’s challenge to the “wet ink” law as unlawful under the Civil Rights Act.

Florida has arrested and prosecuted many returning citizens—persons with felony convictions who are no longer incarcerated—for registering and voting while ineligible. These prosecutions have occurred amid widespread confusion about voting rights restoration in Florida and have been initiated by an Office of Statewide Prosecutor (“OSP”) that has no authority to bring these criminal actions.

Mississippi is home to one of the strictest felon disenfranchisement schemes in the nation. The Mississippi Constitution permanently disenfranchises citizens upon a single felony conviction for certain crimes, including minor offenses like writing a bad check. As a result, the loss of rights under Mississippi’s scheme is mandatory, permanent, and effectively irrevocable. In Hopkins, plaintiffs, a class of formerly incarcerated individuals who lost their right to vote despite completing their sentences, argued that their disenfranchisement violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor and struck down Mississippi’s disenfranchisement scheme as cruel and unusual punishment. But the Fifth Circuit decided to rehear the case en banc, a rare occurrence in which a case is reconsidered by the entire panel of the circuit’s active judges.