ABSTRACT
In Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 US 24, the US Supreme Court upheld the power of states to bar convicted criminals from voting, whether temporarily or indefinitely. The Court had glanced approvingly at laws in a few prior cases, but Richardson marked the first time the Court evaluated their constitutionality. California's high court agreed and struck down the law in Ramirez v. Brown, 507 P.2d 1345. The California ruling did not mention Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. That was understandable, because Section 2 had been almost entirely ignored by the US Supreme Court in the century since its ratification in 1868. A decade after Richardson, the Court held in Hunter v. Underwood, 471 US 222, that criminal-disenfranchisement laws enacted with racially discriminatory intent were unconstitutional. But Hunter set a high standard for proving such intent, and in general Richardson remains a serious obstacle to bringing an equal protection challenge to laws barring convicts from voting.
