This paper examines the efforts of women legislators in the 2020 and 2021 Virginia General Assembly sessions to expand voting rights. V.O. Key (1949:19) characterized Virginia as the state having the “most thorough control [of voting] by an oligarchy” – the Byrd Machine that was committed to racial segregation. Despite the passage of federal civil rights laws in the 1960’s, barriers to voting in Virginia persisted for another fifty years with Virginia identified as the second most difficult state to vote in for the 2016 presidential election (Schraufnagel, et al 2020). It is therefore astonishing that by the end of the 2020 Virginia General Assembly, the legislature had passed legislation to enact no excuse absentee voting, early voting, same day voter registration, and to remove the photo ID requirement for voting. In the 2021 session, the legislature passed the Virginia Voter Rights Act to further protect against racial and language discrimination in voting. The aggregate effect of these measures significantly lowered the cost of voting for state residents and distinguished Virginia as a state leader in efforts to enhance, not restrict, voting.
This paper examines how women legislators – mostly women of color – used their formal and informal sources of power (Kenny 2014) in the majority party to navigate the gendered structures of the Virginia General Assembly (Duerst-Lahti 2002; Hawkesworth 2003) in carrying these bills and securing their passage. I employ a process tracing approach (Beach and Pedersen 2013) and draw on elite interviews of women VA state legislators and archival records from the 2020 and 2021 Virginia General Assembly sessions to reconstruct and analyze the legislative efforts and outcomes. The fact that these women legislators prevailed in their efforts to fundamentally transform Virginia’s voting laws is all the more remarkable given the Commonwealth’s established history of violent voter suppression. It is a further noteworthy achievement since women, especially women of color, are significantly underrepresented as members of the Virginia state legislature, the oldest legislative body in the U.S.
