Ten days before the election, Virginia voters are being asked to repeal a rule that has kept people with felony convictions off the rolls since 1902. The measure is Question 3 on the Nov. 3 ballot, and the people it would reach are disproportionately Black.
In 2024, roughly 260,000 Virginians were banned from voting because of a felony conviction, The Sentencing Project found. That was about one in 10 Black voting-eligible Virginians, and 3.5 times the rate for non-Black residents. Black Virginians are 18% of the state’s population and nearly 52% of its prison population, so the ban lands on them first.
Virginia is one of three states whose constitutions bar people with past felony convictions from voting for life unless the governor restores their rights. The 1902 constitutional convention that wrote the rule was open about its purpose: cutting Black men out of politics after Reconstruction. Nicole D. Porter, the Sentencing Project’s senior director of advocacy, called the system “a legacy of anti-Black exclusion.”
The ballot question asks whether the constitution should be amended to protect the right to vote, and to provide that a person convicted of a felony “is not entitled to vote during his period of incarceration but is automatically invested with the right to vote upon release from incarceration.” It also updates the bar on voting by people found mentally incompetent.
Without the amendment, the right depends on whoever is governor. Democratic governors restored rights to roughly 300,000 people between 2013 and 2021, as Bolts reported. Under Glenn Youngkin, about 50,000 people left prison and fewer than 10,000 had their rights restored. Gov. Abigail Spanberger said in July that her administration had restored rights to 66,085 Virginians since January.
The picture has already shifted this year. After U.S. District Judge John Gibney ruled in January that the state had misapplied a Reconstruction-era law, the state told nearly 235,000 Virginians in September that they can register. Only murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter now cost anyone the vote under that ruling, WHRO reported. Question 3 would write the protection into the constitution, where a court or a governor could not undo it.
Republican lawmakers who opposed putting it on the ballot argued that people convicted of violent crimes should not regain the vote automatically.
Richard Walker, who lost his vote after prison, told WHSV what it meant to be told he could not cast a ballot. “When I came to Virginia after coming out of prison and they told me I couldn’t vote, I became angry,” he said. If the amendment passes, he said, “It’s going to be automatic. All they have to do at that point is register.”
Early voting began Sept. 18. Election Day is Nov. 3.
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