This is old news, but has only now come to the attention of Ballot Access News. In October 2024 a U.S. District Court allowed the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to rescind its old policy of allowing petitioning in the department’s interior sidewalks that connect parking lots with the offices. Here is the order in National Democrataic Policy Committee v Lackey, e.d., 3:88cv-570. It is by U. S. District Court Judge David J. Novak, a Bush Jr. appointee.

In 1988 the Lyndon LaRouche campaign organization had sued Virginia over access to these interior sidewalks, and the state had not contested the lawsuit and had signed a consent decree allowing the petitioning. But in 2024, the Department asked a U.S. District Court judge to rescind the consent decree. The judge agreed, after finding that the original plaintiff no longer exists, and that the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990 had ruled in U.S. v Kokinda that postal sidewalks are not a public forum. However, there was no majority opinion in U.S. v Kokinda, and that decision did not deal with petitioning. In that case the government said that petitioning was not prohibited; it only prohibited transactions involving an exchange of money.

The new court order also says that the either the U.S. Supreme Court, or the Fourth Circult, or courts within the Fourth Circuit, had ruled that there is no public forum involving airport terminals, public library internet access, the interior of polling places, or candidate debates. But these are all very different from publicly-owned sidewalks with no limits on who can walk on those sidewalks.

It is true that the D.C. Circuit ruled in 2012 that postal sidewalks that link post office parking lots and the offices themselves are not public forums, but rulings of the D.C. Circuit are not binding on the Fourth Circuit.