Democrats flipped both chambers of Virginia's state legislature on Tuesday, giving them full control over state government for the first time in a quarter century—and opening the door to a wave of reforms that would make voting easier and protect the right to vote. When lawmakers convene in early January, these are just some of the issues they’ll be poised to tackle:
- Automatic voter registration
- Same-day voter registration
- True early voting (instead of just one week of in-person absentee voting)
- Removing the excuse requirement to vote absentee by mail
- Extending Election Day polling hours
- Curtailing the disenfranchisement of voters who have felony convictions
Legislators in several other states have passed many of these policies, but there’s still more that Virginia Democrats can consider:
- Softening or repealing the state’s voter ID requirement
- Setting campaign contribution limits in place of the existing system that allows unlimited donations to candidates
- Establishing public campaign financing
- Setting up vote centers where any voter within a city or county may cast a ballot instead of just at their local polling place
- Joining the National Popular Vote Compact to help elect the president by popular vote
- Enacting a constitutional amendment to reform redistricting
- Ending prison gerrymandering by counting prisoners at their last address for redistricting purposes instead of where they're incarcerated
- Enacting a constitutional amendment to move state and local elections from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years (and thereby improve turnout)
- Enacting a constitutional amendment explicitly guaranteeing the right to vote in free and fair elections
- Adopting instant-runoff voting (aka ranked-choice voting)
- Letting voters opt into permanently receiving absentee mail ballots
- Establishing universal voting by mail with prepaid postage
- Mandating barcodes on mail ballots so that voters can track the status of their ballot to ensure it gets counted
- Notifying absentee mail voters of any problems with their signatures on their ballots and giving them a chance to correct it
If reforms like these were to become law, Virginia would go from being one of the worst states for voting access to one of the best. Now that Democrats have won, they can transform this dream into reality.
