Virginia voters are deciding whether to amend the state constitution to automatically extend voting rights to people with felony convictions upon their release from incarceration.
If passed, the amendment would take away the role of the governor in restoring the voting rights of felons.
What’s at stake
For more than a century, people convicted of any felony in Virginia permanently lost their right to vote, barring a successful appeal to the state. That changed after a federal judge ruled in January that the state constitution had long been violating an 1870 federal law limiting the broad disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions in the wake of the Civil War.
After months of legal back-and-forth, voting eligibility was restored to many people who previously had been unable to cast ballots — which legal experts have described as a historic shift in access. Currently, the state does not allow people convicted of three felonies — murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter — to vote. Those restrictions would change if the amendment passed, according to Vishal Agraharkar, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, which filed a lawsuit with other groups in 2023, leading to the historic change.
Virginia law also allows the revocation of a person’s right to vote if they have been deemed by a judge to be incapacitated. The proposed amendment would, if passed, clarify that a judge must find that a person “does not understand the act of voting” for their rights to be taken away.
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