The Board, Not the Pieces
What Virginia just showed us about where political power actually lives
When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, the Virginia House of Delegates had already been meeting for more than a hundred and fifty years. The people who built that chamber were enslaved; the hands that quarried the stones, that laid the floors, that carved the woodwork were the hands of people who had no rights and no voice in the government that occupied the building. In four hundred years, no Black person had ever led the Virginia House of Delegates.
So when Don Scott walked to the Speaker’s podium on January 10, 2024 and talked about the people who looked like him who had built the place, he was carrying the weight of a history longer than the life of our nation. He teared up thanking his eighty-eight-year-old mother, watching from the gallery.
“When you see me in the room,” he told his colleagues, “understand I carry all of y’all with me.”
Scott had spent nearly eight years in federal prison on drug charges. Under Virginia’s constitution, that meant he permanently lost the right to vote, not for the duration of his sentence, but forever, unless a governor personally chose to give it back.
Virginia was a slave state, the largest in the country: by 1860, one third of its population was enslaved, roughly 550,000 people. One in every eight enslaved people in the entire United States lived in Virginia. The first enslaved Africans arrived in 1619, the same year the House of Delegates first met. Slavery and representative government in Virginia are the same age.
Virginia fought to preserve slavery and lost. After the Civil War, the federal government readmitted Virginia to the Union under a law called the Readmission Act of 1870. The price of readmission was a promise that Virginia would not change its constitution to strip citizens of the right to vote, except as punishment for a short list of serious crimes, the nine felonies that existed under English common law at the time: murder, manslaughter, arson, burglary, robbery, rape, sodomy, mayhem, larceny. That was the list.
Virginia immediately started breaking the promise.
In 1876, the General Assembly added petit larceny (petty theft) to the list of crimes that cost a person the right to vote. Petty theft was not on the Readmission Act’s list. It wasn’t a common-law felony. But it was a crime that Black Virginians could easily be charged with in a system where white sheriffs decided who to arrest and white juries decided who to convict. The following year, the legislature required courts to send lists of everyone convicted of disqualifying crimes to county voting registrars. The Staunton Spectator made explicit what the system was for: “We publish elsewhere a list of negroes convicted of petit larceny,” the paper advised in 1877. “Challengers should examine it carefully.”
In 1902, a constitutional convention led by Carter Glass, a Lynchburg newspaper editor who would go on to become a U.S. Senator and one of the most powerful politicians in Virginia's history, decided they hadn't gone far enough. They expanded the list of disqualifying crimes to include forgery, perjury, embezzlement, and obtaining money under false pretenses. They added a poll tax. They added a literacy test administered by white registrars who could pass or fail anyone they chose. Glass said the purpose out loud, on the convention floor:
“Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose. That, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for — to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of.”
The convention didn’t submit the new constitution to voters for ratification; they just declared it was in effect. Black voter registration dropped from 147,000 to 21,000. In Richmond, from 6,000 to 760. In Jackson Ward, the heart of Black political life in the capital, from 3,000 to 33.
And the system to keep Black Virginians from voting kept expanding. By 1971, Virginia’s constitution stripped voting rights from anyone convicted of any felony, hundreds of offenses that didn’t exist in 1870, including the entire modern drug code. Drug possession was not a crime in 1870. Drug conspiracy was not a crime in 1870. But Black Virginians are incarcerated at six times the rate of white Virginians, and nationally, Black Americans make up about 5% of drug users but 29% of drug arrests. The crimes were created, the enforcement was selective, and the people convicted lost the right to vote under a provision that was never supposed to cover them. This January, a federal judge ruled that Virginia had been violating the Readmission Act all along.
How voting rights are restored, and who gets their rights back after serving the sentence, is another structural choice. Under Glass’s constitution, restoration required the governor to personally act. One person, at one person’s discretion, with no criteria and no right of appeal. Governor McAuliffe restored rights for 168,000 Virginians; Governor Northam continued that practice. Governor Youngkin ended it. The structure didn’t change, but the person in the chair did, and the structural default for what happens when nobody acts is permanent disenfranchisement. Today, more than 300,000 Virginians can’t vote: that’s one in ten Black adults of voting age in the state.
It was Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of rights that allowed Don Scott to vote again, to become a lawyer, to run for office, to win, to become the first Black Speaker in the four hundred years since slaves were brought to Virginia and the Virginia House of Delegates began operating. And from that position, Scott did something with structural power that almost nobody who has been on the receiving end of it gets the chance to do.
He changed the lines.
Last summer, Donald Trump called Texas Republicans and told them to redraw their congressional maps. This was not after a census, and not because of population shifts, but because he wanted more seats. Texas Governor Abbott called a special session, and Republicans passed maps targeting five Democratic-held seats, most of them majority-minority districts.
Missouri followed, then North Carolina followed, then Ohio followed. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who resisted. Before 2025, only two states had conducted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970. By the end of the year, it was six.
Redistricting is structural power applied to elections the same way disenfranchisement is structural power applied to voters. You don’t need to change anyone’s mind: you change the lines, and the lines do the work. When Texas redraws its maps so that five Democratic seats become Republican, the voters in those districts are still there. They still show up. Their votes just don’t translate into representation anymore. The structure changed the outcome before the campaign started.
Virginia’s Democrats decided to change it back.
Within weeks of the Texas maps passing, Don Scott and the Democratic leadership announced a constitutional amendment to allow mid-decade redistricting. This was procedurally a substantial lift: Virginia requires an amendment to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions with an election in between. They passed it in October 2025. There was an election in November 2025. Then they passed it again in January 2026. They drew a map, and they put it on a special April ballot. 2.5 million Virginians showed up to vote on a single question. There was nothing else on the ballot.
Under the previous lines, Virginia has been sending six Democrats and five Republicans to Congress. Under the new map, Democrats are favored in ten of eleven districts.
Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio tore up their maps mid-decade for partisan advantage. Republicans could net nine additional House seats from those maps alone. California countered with five, and Virginia added four. For the first time in this fight, the two sides are roughly even, because Democrats in two states decided to contest the structure instead of organizing inside lines someone else had drawn.
The fight isn’t over. A circuit court judge in Tazewell County, the same judge who blocked the referendum twice before, who ran for the House of Delegates as a Republican in 1999, called the ballot language “flagrantly misleading” and voided the results the day after the election. Virginia’s attorney general promised an immediate appeal. The Virginia Supreme Court, which already overruled this judge once to let the vote proceed, will have the final word.
And there is one more structural change moving through Virginia right now. In 2025 and 2026, the General Assembly passed a constitutional amendment to automatically restore voting rights to anyone who has completed their felony sentence. If voters approve it in November, Carter Glass’s provision, the one written for the explicit purpose of eliminating Black Virginians from politics, the one that stripped Don Scott of his right to vote, the one that still disenfranchises more than 300,000 people, comes out of Virginia’s constitution for good.
Don Scott stood at the Speaker’s podium in a chamber built by enslaved hands and carried four hundred years of history with him. Then he went to work on the structure itself.