Helen A. Gibson has written a great article for the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service titled "Felons and the Right to Vote in Virginia: a Historical Overview" and I urge everyone to take a few minutes and read the article.
Gibson does a great job of documenting how the state of Virginia continues to struggle with its legacy of one of the highest disenfranchisement rates in the nation and examines felon disenfranchisement and traces its history in the years following the Civil War, when a sizeable African American electorate emerged and was disenfranchised by various tactics.
Until 2014 Virginia was tied with Kentucky for the strictest disenfranchisement laws and highest disenfranchisement rate in the nation. For many years, Virginia disenfranchised felons indefinitely as soon as they were convicted. But even with some recent reforms the state’s current disenfranchised population numbers approximately 450,000 of its 6.4 million voting-age residents, and its felon disenfranchisement laws disproportionately affect black citizens. As of 2010, over 20 percent of the state’s voting-age African American population could not vote as a result of a felony conviction, and nearly 7 percent of the state’s total population 18 and older was disenfranchised.
Things are moving in the right direction in Virginia to restore voting rights to felons in Virginia but the progress is slow.
Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, now U. S. Senator Mark Warner, used his executive clout as governor in 2002 to streamline the application processes for non-violent offenders, reducing the mandatory post-sentence five-to-seven-year waiting period for non-violent offenders to three years. But in the typical Warner style of "bipartisanship" Warner still peddles to this day in the U. Senate, Warner compromised and left drug offenses under the category of violent felonies, leaving hundreds of thousands unable to have their voting rights restored.
And perhaps foreshadowing his own felony conviction, former governor and now convicted felon Bob McDonnell, issued an executive order in May 2013, allowing approximately 350,000 Virginians convicted of non-violent felonies to become eligible to have their voting rights restored without the previous mandatory three-year waiting period. This was a big step considering the fact that the percentage of ex-felons in Virginia’s history granted a restoration of rights prior to May 2013 is estimated to have been less than 3 percent. But because the state of Virginia did not keep track of ex-felons who had finished their sentences, probations and parole, and paid their court costs, fines, and restitutions, there was no way the state of Virginia could inform those past offenders of the news on the new executive action - no surprise there!
Governor Terry McAuliffe, in April of 2014, really stepped in and moved to reduce the waiting time for restorations of rights applications for a violent felony conviction from five years to three years, following the completion of a sentence, etc. McAuliffe was also successful in having drug offenses removed from the list of violent felonies, something Mark Warner failed to do, and which is a racially significant move, considering the fact that in a state like Virginia, where 20 percent of the state population, 60 percent of Virginians in prison, and 72 percent of Virginians incarcerated for drug offenses are African American.
The process of restoring voting rights to convicted felons in the state of Virginia has been been almost non-existent throughout the states history. And even in the modern era, the pace of change is slow, but hopefully, finally on track to get to restore voting rights to those who have been denied their right to vote for too long.
http://www.coopercenter.org/...