RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia's 60-day lawmaking session for 2024 officially ended this weekend, with Gov. Glenn Youngkin weighing in on key issues like voting changes, gun reform and more.
With a major deadline this past Friday, Youngkin had to act on 84 pieces of legislation or have them automatically become law. Of that legislation, 64 passed as written and another 20 were either sent back for amendments or vetoed entirely.
RELATED: Virginia Gov. Youngkin signs 64 bills into law, vetoes 8 others as legislative session winds down
Here's a breakdown of the bills that Youngkin either shot down or sent back to the drawing board.
Vetoes
Gov. Youngkin issued eight vetoes on a range of issues “to prevent the enactment of laws that would redundantly mirror existing statutes, potentially reverse our advancements in safeguarding election data, and impose excessive regulatory constraints on our Commonwealth.”
The most notable, an anticipated veto, was a bill aiming to re-enter Virginia into the Electronic Registration Information Center, known as ERIC. Virginia’s removal from the election data-sharing program garnered regional attention and pushback from election advocates and Virginia Democrats, citing how Virginia was one of the first states to enter into the program.
“Since leaving ERIC, Virginia established data-sharing agreements with numerous states incurring no additional costs. Additionally, the Department of Elections has increased its data sources by collaborating with forty-one states to obtain driver's license surrender data while ERIC only provides data sharing with twenty-five states,” Youngkin wrote in a veto statement.
Youngkin also voted on a firearms bill related to transfers by a “prohibited person” as Democrats hope to push gun reform legislation across the finish line.
“To avoid inadvertent compromises to public safety, policies should refrain from disarming individuals not subject to a court order, making other family members less safe, which contradicts our shared goal. The arbitrary age prohibition, which contradicts our current legal age of possession, on certain transfers adds further confusion,” Youngkin wrote of House Bill 46.
Amendments
Youngkin also took action on a dozen bills, making technical edits and in some cases writing reenactment clauses into the bill languages, which would require those bills to be voted on again at a later time.
Among the bills he added reenactment clauses to are two bills addressing the Virginia Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, including House Bill 597 by Del. Marcia Price (D- Newport News), which would allow localities to take legal action against a landlord by instituting “ an action for injunction and damages to enforce the landlord's duty to maintain the rental dwelling unit in a fit and habitable condition.”
Del. Price has been working for several years to get this legislative effort passed in the Virginia General Assembly but was amended to “direct the Department of Housing and Community Development to examine the legislation within the framework of multiple bills modifying the Virginia Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, to individually and collectively assess the impact on proposed changes that align with the shared goal of housing availability, accessibility, and affordability.
Gov. Youngkin also added a reenactment clause to Senate Bill 189, which would allow the City of Virginia Beach to change its voting system through a charter change.
The amendment is written to allow “for a reassessment of the legislation pending a potential resolution of the ongoing lawsuit involving Virginia Beach.”
The city’s implementation of the recent 10-1 voting system in Virginia Beach has been the subject of several lawsuits, legally arguing that the city isn’t following the proper procedural process to make this change in the first place.
A previous survey of Virginia Beach voters polled found more than 90 percent of respondents preferred the 10-1 voting system across several demographics.
“The question is, why amend it? Why are we trying to delay something, that frankly 80 percent of Virginia Beach said we want to happen? A charter change is typically a non-issue,” Gary McCollum, with the Due the Right Things said, alongside Virginia Beach NAACP leadership.