VIRGINIA's governor, Terry McAuliffe, has a problem similar to one faced by Barack Obama: a Republican-controlled legislature delights in killing his proposals, especially those popular with Democrats. So Mr McAuliffe is doing as Mr Obama has done: implementing some of them by executive fiat. Mr McAuliffe’s latest is a doozy: a order made on April 22nd that restores the voting and civil rights of an estimated 206,000 non-violent and violent felons who have completed their penalties. Until Mr McAuliffe’s order, which came as a surprise, he had been considering the reinstatement of such rights as all Virginia governors have since the mid-1800s: on a case-by-case basis, making for an achingly slow and sometimes erratic process.

Republicans, who have generally opposed making it easier to re-enfranchise felons stripped of their voting rights upon conviction, were quick to complain that by flooding the polls with new voters Mr McAuliffe was simply trying to tip this presidential battleground state to his good friend, Hillary Clinton. But while there is little doubt that Mr McAuliffe’s executive order has become a talking point for both political parties, it is not clear what impact it will have on registration and voting.

Democrats say the governor is correcting an ancient wrong, restoring full privileges of citizenship to a slice of Virginia’s population disproportionately hit by restrictive voting laws and harsh criminal penalties: African-Americans. Beyond their criticism that Mr McAuliffe is giving blatant assistance to Mrs Clinton, Republican legislators complain that Mr McAuliffe’s order will open parts of public life to the wrong people; that, for example, rapists, paedophiles and murderers will be able to sit on criminal juries. But will they vote?

Scholars at Stanford University law school and the University of Pennsylvania studied North Carolina—a neighboring state demographically similar to Virginia—and concluded that few former felons register and fewer vote. Pegged to the 2008 presidential election in which Mr Obama narrowly carried North Carolina, the study showed that 33 percent of felons released there between 2004 and 2008 registered to vote and only 21 percent reported to the polls.

Applying the North Carolina findings to Virginia, campaign professionals and political analysts project that Mr McAuliffe’s order could net roughly 70,000 new voters, of whom many would be African-American and other minorities presumed to favour Democrats. But if only about one-fifth of the original pool bothered to vote, then perhaps 40,000 might participate, with Democrats capturing fewer than 30,000.

That’s not a lot of votes in Virginia, where Mr. Obama twice carried the state: by 234,000, or 6.3 percent in 2008, and 149,000, or 3.9 percent, in 2012. Early polls in suggest that Mrs Clinton would easily carry Virginia against Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, defeating both by nearly 10 percentage points.

America has a mosaic of laws on the restoration of voting rights. The Sentencing Project, a prison rights research group, estimates that 5.85 million Americans are barred from voting because of felony convictions.

In 38 states and Washington, DC most former felons automatically win the right to vote upon completion of their sentence, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Two states, Maine and Vermont, have no restrictions on voting by felons. The other states remove voting rights after a felon finishes probation or parole.

Virginia is among four states—the others are Iowa, Florida and Kentucky—that strip felons of their voting rights for life. They can be reinstated in Virginia by executive decree after the felon, having finished his or her sentence, submits an application through the secretary of the commonwealth, the office that handles the paperwork for clemency and patronage.

The process can take years, requiring that a governor consider each petition. One of Mr McAuliffe’s predecessors, L. Douglas Wilder—the nation’s first elective black governor and long sensitive to minority voting issues—said 20 years ago that the system was too time-consuming and should be simplified.

Mr McAuliffe issued a blanket order after his lawyers and constitutional experts, including the principal author of the state’s current constitution, concluded that there was nothing in state law that would prohibit him from doing so.

Mr McAuliffe’s sweeping, rights-restoration order is not the first by American governor. As governor of Iowa in 2005, Tom Vilsack, now Mr Obama’s agriculture secretary, observed Independence Day by issuing an executive order restoring the rights of all Iowa felons who had completed their sentences. The order, upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court as consistent with the governor’s constitutional powers, restored the rights of about 115,000 people before it was rescinded six years later by a Republican governor, Terry Branstad.

That is an option available to Virginia’s next governor. Mr McAuliffe is prohibited from seeking a second term next year. And his splash in 2016 is already rippling into 2017, when far fewer voters will turn out than in a presidential year—improving chances of a Republican victory and a repeal of Mr McAuliffe’s historic gesture.