Early in his term, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell instituted one of the worst, most restrictive policies for reenfranchising ex-felons in the country. He later backed off those restrictions while under fire from civil rights groups. Then something interesting happened. More people got their voting rights back:
His administration has approved 780 of 889 applicants - 88 percent, according to the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia's Office, which handles the requests.
"It was pretty darn fast," said James Bailey, regional director of the Hampton Roads Missing Voter Project, which encourages felons to apply for restored rights. "I give him props for sticking to what he said he was going to do."
In his short time in office, McDonnell has already outpaced his previous Republican predecessors, Jim Gilmore and George Allen, who only restored rights to 238 and 460 felons repectively, according to the Washington Post.
Still, this is a drop in the bucket. There are more than 300,000 people disenfranchised in Virginia as a result of these laws, which were originally instituted with the express intent of preventing black people from voting--or as one Virginia Delegate in the early 1900s, Carter Glass, put it, the voting restrictions proposed at the time "will eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this State." An Advancement Project report estimated that more than half of the disenfranchised in Virginia are black.
Even though McDonnell's office seems to be handling the requests well, Virginia's policy of individual, discretionary clemency through the executive branch remains, along with Kentucky, the most restrictive in the country. McDonnell deserves credit for taking the matter seriously, but the law still needs to be changed.
