Civil rights groups accuse Virginia officials of illegally blocking campus voters

(VIRGINIA MERCURY) - Civil-rights groups have filed a federal lawsuit in Virginia alleging that state and local election officials are unlawfully rejecting student voter registration forms because they lack dormitory names, room numbers or campus mailbox information — details that the groups say are both irrelevant and discriminatory.

The NAACP Virginia State Conference and co-counsel Advancement Project lodged the suit — titled NAACP Virginia State Conference v. John O’Bannon et al. — in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

They contend that multiple jurisdictions across the commonwealth are denying or delaying registrations from college students who live on campus because they did not include extraneous dorm room information that does not appear on Virginia