Governor Glenn Youngkin is taking a different approach than previous governors when it comes to restoring the right to vote to people previously convicted of felonies.
The origins of Virginia's system giving the governor power to restore voting rights to people previously convicted of felonies dates back to the Jim Crow era. The new state Constitution in 1902 had a number of provisions aimed at reducing the number of Black people who were able to participate, and Shawn Weneta at the ACLU says this racist origin story should not be overlooked.
"It was not to protect public safety or the sanctity of the ballot box or any of these other sorts of things that are thrown around now of do the crime do the time," Weneta says. "That wasn't part of it."
Republican Governor Bob McDonnell started a program of automatically restoring the rights of some former felons, and subsequent governors followed suit. But now Sean Morales-Doyle at the Brennan Center says Glenn Youngkin is reversing that bipartisan trend.
"With this change, Virginia now has the most regressive criminal disenfranchisement policy in the country. Not necessarily disenfranchising the most people," Morales-Doyle. "That distinction may still belong to Florida. But this will be the only state that has a permanent ban on voting for everybody convicted of a felony, subject only to individual decisions being made by the governor."
The Secretary of the Commonwealth says each former inmate is given an application explaining how to ask for their rights to be restored. And each application is considered individually.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
