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Virginia Governor Restoring Voting Rights to Felons
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Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Apr 22, 2016 12:13pm |
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| Category | Rule Change |
| Author | SHERYL GAY STOLBERG |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Friday, April 22, 2016 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia will use his executive power on Friday to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 convicted felons, circumventing his Republican-run legislature. The action will overturn a Civil War-era provision in the state’s Constitution aimed, he said, at disenfranchising African-Americans.
Virginia is one of four states — the others are Kentucky, Florida and Iowa — that impose the harshest restrictions. The Sentencing Project says one in five African-Americans in Virginia is disenfranchised.
In researching the provisions, advisers to the governor turned up a 1906 report quoting Carter Glass, a Virginia state senator as saying they would “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this State in less than five years, so that no single county of the Commonwealth will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.” |
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