JokersUpdates.com: News Stand - “It only took 124 years, but we’ve finally eliminated Jim Crow from the constitution of Virginia.”

Virginia voters have toppled one of the nation’s harshest felony disenfranchisement schemes, ending a Jim Crow-era policy of exclusion that has blocked millions of people from voting since 1902.

Voters approved Amendment 3 on Tuesday, which changed the state constitution to provide that any citizen can vote so long as they’re not actively incarcerated over a felony conviction. The state constitution previously held that anyone convicted of any felony would be disenfranchised for life, unless a governor personally restored those rights on an individual basis.

Virginia had been one of just three states, along with Iowa and Kentucky, where the state constitution called for lifetime disenfranchisement for any felony conviction. Voters erased this rule on Tuesday, approving Amendment 3. The amendment led 55 to 45 percent with the majority of votes counted just before 10 p.m. on election night, when the Associated Press called its victory.

The exclusion reversed by Amendment 3 had been codified in Virginia 124 years ago by explicitly white supremacist state leaders who, after the Civil War, specifically sought to limit Black political power by harshly policing Black residents and then tying criminal convictions to voting rights. Their plan worked as intended: Black voters have been disproportionately blocked from voting in Virginia for more than a century; in the 2016 election, for instance, 22 percent of Black adults in Virginia were disenfranchised, compared to just 4 percent of the rest of the population.

“It’s a turning point in the state of Virginia,” George Hawkins, a formerly disenfranchised man, said of Amendment 3. “It’s a turning point for criminal justice reform. It’s powerful, and that’s why certain people fought to keep it this way for so long.”

https://boltsmag.org/virginia-passes-amendment-3-ending-harsh-felony-disenfranchisement/