Sixth Circuit chides NAACP for lack of evidence in felon re-enfranchisement case

CINCINNATI (CN) — The NAACP’s failure to cite specific convicted felons it helped regain the right to vote deprives it of standing and dooms its challenge to Tennessee’s voting “documentation policy,” a Sixth Circuit panel ruled Thursday.

Although the Tennessee chapter of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization spent money and devoted significant resources in its efforts to re-establish the voting rights of eligible individuals, it failed to show a threat of immediate harm or any future injury, according to the panel in its ruling.

The three-judge panel tossed a federal court’s April 2024 injunction that stopped Tennessee from requiring convicted felons to submit additional documentation to restore their voting rights.

The panel said that the Tennessee Conference of the NAACP — which filed a federal lawsuit against Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and Secretary of State Tre Hargett in 2020 — didn’t have standing to claim that claimed portions of the state’s voter registration requirements violated the National Voter Registration Act.

The state appealed the injunction and the case was argued before a three-judge panel at the Sixth Circuit in January.

In its ruling authored by U.S. Circuit Judge Eric Murphy, a Donald Trump appointee, the panel leaned heavily on the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court case FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — which limited a previously held standard that a “diversion of resources” was sufficient to prove a concrete injury and establish organizational standing in cases where a group was not directly regulated by a certain law.

The Supreme Court case ultimately neutered the NAACP’s claims, according to the panel.

“The court in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine made clear that organizations can sometimes have standing to challenge a government action that does not regulate them if the action causes them to suffer economic harms. But the court also made clear that organizations cannot ‘spend their way into standing’ by voluntarily using resources to counter government action,” Murphy wrote.

The panel expressed no doubts about whether the NAACP spent money to help convicted felons restore their voting rights, but was quick to point out the expenditures were entirely voluntary and, ultimately, “self-inflicted,” according to Murphy.

While these types of economic damages could theoretically be used to establish standing — even in the wake of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — Murphy found the NAACP’s lack of specific evidence damning.

“The NAACP did not introduce into the summary judgment record a single ‘specific ’ example of any actual costs incurred. The NAACP did not ‘identify’ even one applicant with a prior felony conviction whom it had previously helped. It did not identify this applicant’s prior convictions or the reasons why the applicant was eligible to vote.

“The NAACP also did not identify what it had done to assist this applicant or when it had undertaken those efforts. Nor did it show that any prior need to track down an applicant’s criminal records had been caused by the documentation policy rather than by, say, an applicant’s failure to remember the dates of prior convictions,” he said.

The Trump appointee also emphasized that the NAACP sought and received an injunction against future harms, which requires it to show a likelihood of an imminent and recurring injury.

Yet again, Murphy pointed out the group failed to identify a single individual it planned to help overcome the logistical hurdles of the documentation policy in the future.

“Without those allegations, the plaintiffs can assert only ‘speculative fears’ that they may suffer harm,” he said.

Murphy pointed out U.S. District Judge William Campbell Jr. erred “twice over” before the case reached the appeals court, in both denying the state’s motion for summary judgment and granting that of the NAACP.

“The NAACP has the burden to prove its standing. So it could obtain summary judgment in its favor only if it ‘affirmatively introduced evidence of such weight that no rational jury could disagree with it.’ The NAACP fell well short of this demanding standard,” he concluded.

However, in the closing paragraph of its opinion, the panel chose to allow the case to be remanded to federal court, where Campbell will be permitted to decide whether to grant the state’s summary judgment motion or allow the NAACP to conduct additional discovery and supplement the record.

Attorney Blair Bowie of the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., told Courthouse News the NAACP has been working to submit more evidence in the case, even prior to Thursday’s decision from the Sixth Circuit.

“We look forward to giving the court the additional specificity and level of detail they are seeking,” she said.

Bowie pointed out the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine decision was released after her client’s case was argued at the Sixth Circuit, and that Thursday’s opinion was the appeals court’s interpretation of the high court’s ruling.

“What the Sixth Circuit said is that the NAACP has not shown standing. It did not determine the NAACP does not have standing, and that is an important distinction,” she said.

Two other Donald Trump appointees, U.S. Circuit Judges John Bush and Joan Larsen, rounded out the panel.

The State of Tennessee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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