This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters.
In Virginia next week, democracy is literally on the ballot for people with felony convictions.
Voters will decide whether to automatically restore voting rights to people with felony convictions after they are released from prison, potentially dismantling one of the country’s most restrictive disenfranchisement systems.
That referendum is the latest in a series of moves that have chipped away at the blunt force of that system, a relic of the old Jim Crow legal apparatus that once prevailed across the South.
The outcome could have implications for Mississippi, which shares Virginia’s long history of felony disenfranchisement but has made fewer moves towards reform. And regardless of what happens Tuesday, Virginia’s experience offers a few lessons for Mississippi lawmakers and voting rights advocates.
For one, Virginia has demonstrated how much can change without amending its constitution.
Some of Virginia’s recent governors have used their restoration powers widely. Most recently, Gov. Abigail Spanberger restored voting rights to more than 66,000 people with felony convictions.
The courts have served as another avenue for change. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that the sweeping voting prohibitions in Virginia’s constitution violated a Reconstruction-era law. As a condition of reentry into the Union following the Civil War, the law limited the crimes for which someone could have their voting rights taken away.
“For well over a century, the Commonwealth of Virginia has disobeyed a federal law
designed to protect the right of former enslaved people to vote,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge John Gibney early this year.
That decision alone restored rights to thousands of Virginians, many of whom now plan to vote in the referendum next week. Other Southern states could face similar lawsuits, though none have yet been filed.
But some of the changes in Virginia aren’t necessarily permanent. Governors can change restoration policies from one administration to the next — as Spanberger did in reversing her predecessor’s efforts to narrow reenfranchisement.
And even after Gibney’s ruling, which the state did not appeal, voting rights advocates say the Virginia referendum is still needed to make the protections more durable. “Federal rulings can be overturned,” said Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy with The Sentencing Project. “The underlying language in the constitution does need to be changed.”
If the Virginia referendum passes, it would leave Mississippi as the state where people with felony convictions face the most legally onerous restrictions.
Like Virginia, Mississippi’s disenfranchising laws are written in the state’s constitution, a product of the 1890 constitutional convention that enshrined Jim Crow throughout the state. The provision has been amended several times, but the core remains undisturbed: A lifetime voting ban imposed for a range of felony convictions.
Unlike Virginia, not all felonies trigger the lifetime ban. In fact, many people in Mississippi can legally vote even from prison, though the hurdles to do so are steep. However, there are 10 crimes — which have been interpreted to cover more than 100 charging statutes — that do trigger lifetime disenfranchisement. Not all of them are violent. Felony shoplifting or writing a bad check, for example, will strip someone’s voting rights for life. The Marshall Project found in 2024 that at least 55,000 people have lost their voting rights in Mississippi since 1994.
Mississippi has some of the same tools Virginia has used to restore voting rights, but has made far less use of them.
In Mississippi, either the governor or the Legislature can restore voting rights to someone who has lost them. Governors have rarely used this power, though, and the Legislature has been incredibly haphazard in its approach to the issue. There’s no formal application process or restoration procedure. Instead, voting and civil rights organizations have largely stepped in to work with individual lawmakers, asking them to sponsor restoration measures. Even so, in some recent sessions, not a single restoration measure has been approved.
That means Mississippi lags far behind Virginia, even without accounting for the federal court ruling and next week’s referendum. Voting rights advocates in Mississippi say that the Legislature could, through procedural reform, largely automate the restoration process for at least some people, restoring voting rights of more people with less time and energy than the current process requires.
And a successful referendum in Virginia might prompt at least some advocates for reform in Mississippi to renew attention on the issue, perhaps with different strategies.
Still, the path forward is not easy.
Three different lawsuits have challenged Mississippi's disenfranchisement system in federal court. None have been successful. And with Mississippi’s system enshrined in its constitution, simply changing statutory law can’t truly wind back disenfranchisement. Instead, advocates have focused on efforts to wield the Legislature’s restoration powers more widely, perhaps even automatically.
There’s been some bipartisan interest in the idea in recent years, at least in the state House, but the concept keeps stalling out in the state Senate. Taking the issue to a ballot referendum has not received much focus among reformers.
There’s currently no voter-initiated ballot referendum process in Mississippi. But if lawmakers put felony disenfranchisement up for a vote, Rep. Kabir Karriem, a Democratic lawmaker, believes it would pass.
“I think people understand that you deserve a second chance once you’ve paid your debt to society,” said Karriem, who chairs the Legislative Black Caucus in the Mississippi House of Representatives.
Disenfranchisement reform is one of a few criminal justice reform areas that shows at least some durable bipartisan interest.
In Missouri, this year, a Republican-sponsored bill restored voting rights to about 40,000 people on probation and parole. Previously, in Nebraska, lawmakers in 2024 granted voting rights to people immediately upon release from prison, eliminating a two-year waiting period.
The sponsor of the Missouri legislation, Rep. Melanie Stinnett, has said campaign-trail conversations galvanized her on the issue. She also told KCUR in Kansas City earlier this year that expanding voting rights can prevent recidivism — the chance that a person released from prison is arrested for a new crime.
"If we can get people engaged and keep them out of our jails and prisons, then I think we should be doing everything we can to support that type of legislation," Stinnet said.
