The Virginia GOP Is Trying to Keep These Two Women—and 206,000 Like Them—From Voting in November

Gov. Terry McAuliffe holds up the order he signed to restore rights to felons in Virginia at the state Capitol in Richmond last month. Mark Gormus/AP Virginia Republicans have followed through on their threat to sue Gov. Terry McAuliffe over his April 22 decision to restore the voting rights of more than 200,000 felons, filing suit on Monday with the state's Supreme Court and alleging that the governor overstepped his authority.

"The Virginia constitution has a blanket prohibition on felons voting, but it gives the governor a narrow clemency power to restore voting rights or other political rights," said Charles Cooper, the Washington, DC, lawyer hired by the state Republicans to challenge the decision. "But that power, we are arguing, can be exercised by the governor only on an individualized basis." Cooper said McAuliffe's two predecessors, Tim Kaine, a Democrat, and Bob McDonnell, a Republican, looked at voting restorations and concluded that the governor could only restore voting rights "case by case, rather than en masse and categorically, the way he has." He added that "the imminence of the November elections, the importance of the issue, convinced us that we really ought to ask the Supreme Court to take it up immediately."...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/virginia-republicans-sue-governor-over-voting-rights-restoration