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Voters approved three amendments to the Virginia Constitution — protecting abortion and other reproductive healthcare rights; enshrining marriage equality; and automatically returning voting rights to people after they complete felony sentences — Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
AP called Ballot Question 1 shortly after 9 p.m. with “Yes” leading by a 60.9%–39.1% margin. Calls in favor of Ballot Questions 2 and 3 followed just after 9:30 p.m.
Reproductive rights
The victory for “Yes” on Ballot Question 1 allows for abortions through the second trimester and decreases barriers to third-trimester abortions, protects contraception and fertility care, and shields healthcare providers from criminal prosecution.
After certification, the Virginia Constitution will read that “every individual has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including the ability to make and carry out decisions relating to one’s own prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, abortion care, miscarriage management, and fertility care.”
Barring federal legislation that restricts abortion nationwide, reproductive care will have durable protections in Virginia — and cannot be restricted by a legislature and governor opposed to the procedure.
Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly had pushed for a constitutional amendment since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court in June 2022.
Virginia’s constitutional process requires that an amendment pass the legislature twice: before and after an election of the House of Delegates. Republicans in the House of Delegates defeated the amendment in 2023, but Democratic majorities of the legislature referred it to voters after passage in 2025 and 2026.
About 41,000 abortions were provided in Virginia in each month of 2025, according to data from the Society for Family Planning. According to research by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit supporting abortion rights, nearly 9,000 people came to Virginia seeking abortion care in 2025.
Virginians for Reproductive Freedom, which advocated for a “Yes” vote, spent $3.7 million on the campaign, through Oct. 26. It dwarfed the spending of a coalition of those campaign for “No,” which spent about $850,000.
The amendment still has a challenge in court that will be heard Nov. 13. The Founding Freedoms Law Center, the legal branch of the Family Foundation, says the ballot language for the amendment was misleading and asks Tazewell Circuit Court to block certification of the election results.
“The fight’s not over,” said Jessi Blakely, state director for Family Foundation Action. “We’re not necessarily surprised, just based on how the process has been run and what the ballot language was, but we’re hopeful that we’ll get a good look at it in court.”
Marriage equality
The “Yes” vote on Ballot Question 2 does not change anything in the immediate term, but guards against a possibility that worried LGBTQ+ advocates: that the US Supreme Court would overturnObergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that invalidated a 2006 amendment.
It also officially codifies Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case permitting interracial marriage.
The Associated Press made a race call at9:31 p.m., with 56.1% “Yes” votes to 43.9% “Nos.”
Once the results are certified, the Virginia Constitution will no longer say “only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth.”
Instead, it will read that “marriage is one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness,” and that officials cannot deny a marriage on “the basis of the sex, gender, or race.”
Religious organizations funded campaigns against the approval of the amendment, with much of the messaging vilifying transgender people and invoking children. It’s similar to a campaign strategy that did not pay off for Republicans in the 2023 or 2025 general elections.
As some states moved to legalize same sex marriage in the mid-2000s, Virginia did the opposite. In 2006 the so-called Marshall-Newman Amendment, named for its patrons, defined marriage as between only one man and one woman.
Then in 2015, the Supreme Court found the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution protected same-sex unions. Decades earlier, the court found the same clause also protects interracial marriages in Loving v. Virginia.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization weakened the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, raising the likelihood that Obergerfell could be overturned.
“I am a lesbian, married 21 years,” said Dina Persico, a Chesterfield voter Tuesday. “But it was simple to me because it really wasn’t changing much. It’s just protecting the language.”
While LGBTQ advocates have been pushing to remove the 2006 amendment for years, Democrats had not put it on the ballot due to the Obergefell protections.
After Dobbs, the statehouse wasn’t in control by democrats for two consecutive cycles, presenting a political obstacle to passing an amendment. Virginia requires the legislature to pass a constitutional amendment twice, with an election in between.
Virginians for Marriage equality had spent nearly $700,000 campaigning for yes, while the “No” campaigns had raised a comparatively negligible amount.
Voting rights restoration
After the passage of Ballot Question 3, which was called by the Associated Pressat 9:34 p.m., Virginians who lose their right to vote over a felony conviction get those rights back once they’re released from incarceration.
The amendment does four things:
- creates a “fundamental right to vote” that could provide a basis for challenges to new voting restrictions
- assures that incarcerated people cannot vote in Virginia
- automatically restores the voting rights of Virginians convicted of three disqualifying felonies — murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter — once they’re released
- updates a standard courts use to determine whether people should be disenfranchised — from general “mental incompetence” to a lack of capacity to understand the act of voting
When the amendment was added to the ballot, Virginia stripped anyone’s right to vote if they were convicted of a felony and gave the governor sole authority to restore them.
That framework applied to each of the roughly 1,000 felonies outlined in Virginia law.
Legislators have pushed for decades for a constitutional amendment to automatically restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies, with different iterations.
“It was the restoration of rights for nonviolent felonies. Then it became just felonies. It kind of went back and forth for a while,” said State Sen. Mamie Locke (D–Hampton) of the proposed amendments carried by different legislators.
Locke first carried a version of the amendment that would restore rights to people convicted of any felony in 2009. Locke sometimes introduced her proposed amendments alongside those carried by the late state Sen. Yvonne Miller, also a Hampton Roads Democrat, who was well-known for introducing rights restoration amendments.
The practice dates back to the 1902 constitution in Virginia, when lawmakers introduced it with the intent of disenfranchising Black Virginians.
“I would go to my grave under the oppression of self condemnation if I failed here to assert the right and at any cost to secure the means of white supremacy in the conduct of the affairs of this government and of every city and county in the Commonwealth from one extremity to the other,” said state Sen. Carter Glass (D–Lynchburg) at the the time.
The provisions held over into Virginia’s 1971 constitution, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands until a federal court ruling earlier this year. According to advocacy organization The Sentencing Project, about 250,000 were unable to vote after leaving prison as of 2024.
But a federal judge ruled in January that Virginians should only lose their voting rights if they’re convicted of crimes that line up with common-law felonies on the books in 1870 — a condition of Virginia’s readmission to the United States after the Civil War.
After months of back-and-forth over how to interpret that ruling, Virginians only lose their voting rights if they’re convicted of murder, voluntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter. The state notified about 235,000 Virginians in September that they should have never lost their right to vote.
Backers of the amendment, including Gov. Abigail Spanberger, called for the voting rights restoration process to be taken out of the hands of the governor.
The state’s governor has had broad discretion to shape the process, so it could change — and often has — when another administration comes into office.
Opponents questioned whether people convicted of breaking the law should be able to elect lawmakers. And others raised concerns that automatically restoring someone’s voting rights upon their release would mean that person doesn’t need to pay any restitution or any court fees or fines.
Supporters of the measure said making sure people pay these costs is just another barrier and is akin to a poll tax.
All results are unofficial until certified by the state.
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