Sentencing Project 

When the votes are tallied in Virginia’s race for governor on Tuesday, over 300,000 citizens will be missing from the voting rolls – including 20% of the state’s black population.

The reason is not low turnout or voter ID, but a growing and often invisible barrier to voting that is upending elections around the country.

Over 5 million Americans are barred from voting because they have criminal records, according to a report this year from The Sentencing Project.

The crackdown on ballot access is so intense, a majority of states actually bar former convicts from voting even after they are released from prison. 

If voting rights were restored to those former inmates, about 4.3 million more Americans would be able to vote. That is over three times margin of victory in the last House midterm elections. 

“You have this chunk of voters that’s not there,” explains NBC News political director Chuck Todd. “When you see the decisions that have been made on this issue – and a lot of voting access issues – it’s clear that political partisans are operating on what’s best for their own party’s cause, period,” says Todd.

Jean Chung, a researcher at The Sentencing Project, found that Black Americans over 18 years old are disenfranchised at “a rate more than four times greater than the rest of the adult population.” 

Restricting felony voting naturally perpetuates racial disparities at earlier steps in the criminal justice process, from presuming the guilt of blacks by disproportionately profiling and policy them, to punishing black drug defendants more harshly than white defendants.