During his attempts to restore voting rights for hundreds of thousands of felons, Gov. Terry McAuliffe has called the state's felon voting ban unusually restrictive, saying Virginia is one of just four states that take away felons' political rights for life unless a rights restoration request is made to the governor.

Without any accompanying legislation, Simon's proposed amendment, co-patroned by six other Democrats, would put Virginia at the opposite end of the spectrum, joining only Maine and Vermont among states that have no restrictions on felon voting.

"What else do Maine and Vermont have in common? According to census data, they have the smallest non-white populations, ranked 49th and 50th. So they never needed to get creative about denying people of color the right to vote. There simply weren't enough of them to matter," Simon said.

Republicans, who are still fighting McAuliffe's attempts to use his executive authority to restore rights to more than 200,000 felons, have pushed back against the suggestion of racial motivations. They've pointed out that the felon voting ban originated in a Virginia constitution adopted in 1830, before African-Americans had the rights to vote, and was retained in a 1971 rewrite that did away with other discriminatory voting policies such as literacy tests and poll taxes.