Virginia Organizing Vice Chair Reflects on Recent Steps Towards Restoration of Voting Rights
Duane Edwards has advocated for changes to Virginia's disenfranchisement law for almost two decades. Now, a constitutional amendment & a historic court decision mean such changes could be on the way.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Duane Edwards has been advocating for the automatic restoration of voting rights to people who have completed felony sentences for almost two decades.
Now that a constitutional amendment that would grant such restoration has been approved by the General Assembly and will go before voters in a referendum in November, he’s feeling a mix of excitement and nerves.
“For this to come to the people on the ballot—I’m excited for that, but then at the same time, this will kind of tell me whether it’s as important an issue to other people as it is to me,” said Edwards, a Spotsylvania resident and vice chair of Virginia Organizing—and a returning citizen himself—in a phone call with the Advance.
“Now, it’s not just going to the politicians and telling them what I want them to do. Now, I’m going to have an opportunity to see how my neighbors really feel about this.”
Virginia is now the only state with a constitution that disenfranchises citizens with past felony convictions and grants the governor the sole authority to restore voting rights.
Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, established a process in 2013 for automatically restoring voting rights to nonviolent offenders who completed their sentences, probation, and parole—a process Edwards followed to have his voting rights restored in 2015.
Subsequent Democratic governors Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam expanded the restoration process established by McDonnell. But Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, who completed his four-year term this month, stopped following this process. His office evaluated applications on a case-by-case basis and approved fewer and fewer applications every year since 2022, according to reporting by Virginia Public Media.
A constitutional amendment that would have changed Virginia’s disenfranchisement law passed the General Assembly in March of 2021, failed the following year in a House of Delegates subcommittee, and has now passed the General Assembly again.
Also this month, a federal judge ruled that Virginia’s disenfranchisement law is in violation of the 1870 Virginia Readmission Act, which allowed the state to gain congressional representation after the Civil War.
The act lists a number of conditions Virginia must follow in order to regain representation, including, “That the Constitution of Virginia shall never be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the right to vote by the Constitution herein recognized, except as a punishment for such crimes as are now felonies at common law.”
In 2023, the ACLU of Virginia filed a challenge of the state’s disenfranchisement law on behalf of two plaintiffs who were convicted and served sentences on felony drug possession charges.
According to court filings, the conditions of the Virginia Readmission Act were meant to “protect Black suffrage by precluding the use of seemingly race-neutral constitutional amendments to suppress the Black vote” and “to prevent former Confederate states from manipulating their state criminal codes to disenfranchise Black people.”
King v. Youngkin argues that Virginia did just that by amending its constitution to disenfranchise people convicted of a broader range of crimes than those considered felonies at the time of the 1870 Readmission Act.
Crimes considered felonies at the time include murder, manslaughter, arson, and burglary, but not more modern felony offenses such as drug possession and forgery.
In 2024, according to ACLU of Virginia, an estimated 260,000 people in Virginia were disenfranchised as a result of a felony conviction.
On January 22, Senior U.S. District Judge John Gibney entered his opinion in King v. Youngkin, finding that Virginia’s constitution “runs afoul of the Virginia Readmission Act by allowing the Commonwealth to disenfranchise people for crimes that were not ‘felonies at common law’ as defined in 1870.
Edwards said these movements towards restoration of voting rights represent “democracy working out.”
“Democracy is an experiment,” he said. “If those before us get it wrong, we have a process for changing it and getting it right.”
And this process doesn’t end, Edwards said. He’s already thinking about what’s next, and that’s ensuring that when people leave incarceration, they have the education they need to come home “full fledged citizens.”
“If your town needs plumbing, let this person go to prison and get a plumbing degree so they can come right back into society and pay their debt,” Edwards said. “So I’m looking forward to getting education back into” the country’s jails and prisons.
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