Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment that automatically restores the right to vote upon release from incarceration, reversing a century-old provision enacted to limit Black political power by imposing a lifetime voting ban for conviction of any felony.
Amendment 3, which passed with over 56% of the vote, eliminates voting restrictions that were adopted in 1902 to “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this State” and ensure “the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.”
“It only took 124 years,” Scott Surovell, Democratic majority leader in the Virginia Senate, told Bolts, “but we’ve finally eliminated Jim Crow from the constitution of Virginia.”
An Overt and Intended Effort
Virginia’s lifetime voting ban for any felony conviction was codified in its 1902 constitution by “explicitly white supremacist state leaders” who, Bolts explains, “specifically sought to limit Black political power by harshly policing Black residents and then tying criminal convictions to voting rights.”
Indeed, in a landmark ruling earlier this year, a federal judge found that Virginia’s felony disenfranchisement law violated the Readmission Acts, which specifically conditioned readmission on Confederate states’s agreement to limit felony disenfranchisement. As Bolts recounts, Congress anticipated that Southern states would “manipulate and weaponize the criminal legal system to prevent Black people from voting,” and so it mandated that people could lose voting rights for only certain felonies. Intent on blocking as many Black voters as possible, Virginia banned voting upon conviction of any felony (a list that grew to more than 1,000).
The policy succeeded—by 2016, one in five Black Virginians were permanently barred from voting.
It also made Virginia an outlier, as one of only three states with lifetime voting bans for people with any felony conviction. Like in the other two states—Iowa and Kentucky—governors have issued orders to restore voting rights en masse in Virginia.
In 2016, Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order restoring the rights of more than 200,000 people who were convicted of felonies, served their sentences, and completed parole. But lawmakers sued, arguing the order exceeded the governor’s authority, and the state supreme court agreed. More than 9,000 Virginians who had registered to vote after the governor’s order saw their names deleted from the record of registered voters months before the 2016 election.
Gov. McAuliffe ultimately issued individual orders that restored the voting rights of some 170,000 Virginians. His successor, Ralph Northam, announced an executive action that restored the right to vote to all Virginians when they left prison, even if they remained on community supervision, impacting some 126,000 people, according to Bolts.
But when Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced in 2023 that he would end automatic rights restoration and instead evaluate whether to restore voting rights on a case-by-case basis, voting rights advocates recognized that a more permanent change was needed.
In January 2026, after earlier approval by the House of Delegates, the Virginia Senate approved Amendment 3 to go to the voters in November, with the support of Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who reversed her predecessor’s program and restored the voting rights of 66,000 people in July.
“Taking away a person’s right to vote who has been convicted of a felony has never been about punishing people who committed a crime. It was and remains an overt and intended effort to block Black people from voting,” state Sen. Mamie Locke said during floor debate.
“When felony disenfranchisement was incorporated in the post-Reconstruction 1902 Constitution alongside poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses, it was just one tool designed to stop as many Black people from voting as possible,” she argued. “It is beyond dispute that felony disenfranchisement was and is as Jim Crow as poll taxes.”
A Turning Point for Virginia
Amendment 3 explicitly recognizes voting as a fundamental right in the Virginia Constitution—for the first time—and it ensures that anyone leaving prison will be automatically eligible to register to vote, even if they are still on probation or parole, no matter who is elected governor.
Having the rules enshrined in the constitution will make it easier for people to understand their eligibility to vote, experts told Bolts, which has found that confusion about their eligibility to vote and fear of being accused of voting illegally deters many people with past convictions from voting.
Virginia’s vote on Amendment 3 was the first statewide vote on felony disenfranchisement in the U.S. since California voters approved a 2020 measure to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions upon leaving incarceration.
Virginia has now joined 23 other states that restore voting rights upon leaving prison. Bolts reports that two more states, Maine and Vermont, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., never disenfranchise anyone over a felony conviction, even during incarceration.
“It’s a turning point in the state of Virginia,” George Hawkins, a formerly disenfranchised man, told Bolts. “It’s a turning point for criminal justice reform. It’s powerful, and that’s why certain people fought to keep it this way for so long.”