So why the Republican resistance to what is clearly the right move by Mr. McAuliffe? It’s a mix of self-interested politics and race. People coming out of prison are disproportionately black, and blacks tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. But there’s no clear evidence of a partisan skew in voting by people coming out of prison. And even if there were a demonstrable Democratic bias, that would be no reason to deny someone the right to vote. (It’s worth pointing out that felon disenfranchisement was an issue in the Virginia governor’s race this year, and the candidate who campaigned on the horrors of restoring the vote to “violent felons and sex offenders” lost by 9 points.)

The bottom line is that this shouldn’t be a partisan issue. By an overwhelming majority, Americans of all political stripes support voting by those who have paid their debt to society. In recent years both liberal and conservative states have made it easier to restore the right to vote, on the understanding that disenfranchising people with criminal records serves no purpose other than to keep them at the edges of society. In Virginia, it was a Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, who took the important first steps toward restoring voting rights on a large scale. Maine and Vermont allow people to vote while they are still incarcerated, and no one is contending that this has led either state to collapse into a lawless hellscape.

America has plenty of problems with its electoral system, but too many people voting is not one of them. Whoever wins the contested House races in Virginia, the fact that tens of thousands of new voters were able to participate is a win for everybody.