A 124-Year-Old Voting Ban Designed to Silence Black Virginians Is Finally Gone

While Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress, governors’ mansions, and state legislatures across the country, Virginia overturned its “Jim Crow-era lifetime ban” on voting for people with prior felony convictions. 

Voters approved a ballot amendment that restores voting rights to people with felony convictions immediately upon their release, along with two other ballot initiatives that enshrined reproductive rights and same-sex marriage protections in the state’s constitution. The law restoring voting rights to formerly incarcerated people passed by over 10 percentage points with 96.8 percent of votes counted, according to NBC News. 

Enacted back in 1902, Virginia’s law banned anyone convicted of a felony from voting for the rest of their lives. Back then, one hundred male white delegates passed this provision with the explicit intent of disenfranchising Black voters. While plenty of other states bar former felons from voting, Virginia was only one of three states, along with Iowa and Kentucky, with this Jim Crow-era law on the books. In February 2026, The Sentencing Project reported that over a quarter of a million Virginians were blocked from voting because of it. 

I reported earlier this week about the challenges unhoused voters in Virginia face in casting their ballots. In it, I spoke with Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, who told me that there’s a revolving door between incarceration and homelessness. 

In the wake of the 2024 Supreme Court case, in which the justices ruled that local governments could enforce public camping and sleeping bans without violating the Constitution, Whitehead’s organization has tracked 320 new ordinances across the country criminalizing homelessness. “We certainly have seen more draconian criminalization practices,” he told me. 

States are increasingly targeting unhoused people with criminal penalties, despite this group facing staggering disparities, resource shortages, and limited outreach. In Tennessee, it’s a felony if you’re found on public property while unhoused. In Kentucky, the state decriminalized the use of deadly force to remove an unhoused person from private property. And in Louisiana, homelessness is a crime punishable by harsh fines and jail sentences. “That sentence can also include hard labor,” Whitehead informed me.

Virginia previously allowed former felons to vote only if a governor pardoned them or they successfully petitioned for restoration. It functioned as a sort of double punishment that disproportionately affects people of color. “It’s really a way to remove more people from the ranks of voters in our country, and it silences voices,” Whitehead told me. 

People experiencing homelessness face a litany of challenges when casting their votes, even without facing prior felony convictions. They include strict voter registration guidelines, maintaining up-to-date documentation, and just physically getting to the polling site. Some states, like California, Washington, Vermont, and New Jersey, are actively trying to make voting more accessible. But in states like Florida, Kansas, and Mississippi, voting is getting harder after passing restrictive voting registration and ID laws, some of which require eligible voters to show proof of citizenship. 

Since 2013, Virginia governors have taken steps to restore voting rights to hundreds of thousands of people with past convictions, but former Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin revived the lifetime ban on voting for people with felony convictions in 2023. 

Under Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger, Virginia voters have made it a little easier. 

“We have to start embracing the concept of radical neighborliness,” Whitehead told me, “and start to see people living on the streets as our neighbors.”