Sal Orlando, News Editor
“It makes you still feel like you have a scarlet letter in your head, like I’m less than, or that I’m not a full citizen,” Sam Harris, a Suffolk resident, said about previously losing his voting rights.
Harris was granted his right to vote back by Gov. Abigail Spanberger last month, along with over 66,000 other people who were previously convicted of a felony, in her time in office.
Under the Virginia Constitution, no person convicted of a felony is qualified to vote unless their civil rights are restored by the governor.
The immediate reenfranchisement for over a quarter million people will be on the ballot this November in Virginia, the first time in 44 years.
Reenfranchisement is the granting of rights back to people who had them taken away, according to Oxford Dictionary.
Harris reflected on not voting in the 1993 gubernatorial election and former Gov. George Allen signing a bill abolishing parole.
“That was in the 90s, and imagine me going to prison in 99, 2000 and being affected by something that the government came in and did,” Harris said.
Harris mentioned he regretted not voting prior to his incarceration, and would vote if he was ever given the opportunity.
Harris was grateful for his pardon by former Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but felt it was contradictory that he was not also reenfranchised. Youngkin restored the rights of 9,563 people in his time as governor.
King v. Youngkin was a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia against the state for stripping the voting rights of every Virginian with a felony conviction. The decision reenfranchised Virginians whose voting rights were taken away for felony convictions that were common law felonies in 1870.
“When you are denied things or saying you can’t do anything, it makes people see you in the worst light,” Harris said.
Harris is the co-founder of Reentry and Recovery Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing reentry-focused support, according to their website.
Sergio Hayes, a Newport News resident, said reenfranchising people empowers them and the current law is a relic of a “very ugly” past. He regained his voting rights last year.
“I had to jump through 1,000 hoops to get my rights restored,” Hayes said. “Others who went through the same thing as me, they had to jump through 1,000 hoops. Wouldn’t it be great when someone is released, they have one less thing to worry about?”
Hayes believes that the process of restoring formerly incarcerated people’s right to vote should be easier.
“When I went to register [to vote] at City Hall here in Newport News, I walked out of there after I registered, the city jail was right there,” Hayes said. “I saw the razor wire, I saw the inmates that were being loaded into the transport van. I’m like, ‘That used to be me, but now this is me.’”
Charlene Newsome, a Newport News resident, was granted her right to vote back in 2014, and believes it is important for people who return home from being incarcerated and be able to have a voice in their communities.
“When I got my rights restored, I screamed,” Newsome said. “I will never forget them [her daughters] coming to say ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong,’ and I’m like ‘No, what’s right, what’s right.’”
Newsome said many people are not educated on having their rights restored upon reentry, or that their rights were even taken from them.
Joseph Prater, a Richmond resident, regained his voting rights back from Spanberger last month, to will vote for the first time this November.
Prater said that he is going to gather others who gained their right to vote on Election Day, and celebrate their ability to vote.
“There’s stuff you can’t do in prison because that’s the prison environment, so when you come home, you expect it to be a clean slate,” Prater said. “I went and did my time. I’m supposed to be rehabilitated, did all the programs they asked me to do. When I come home, I should be given a real second chance.”
Prater said that he and other people in incarceration watched more news than he had previously and understood a lot about political candidates and their platforms.
“When you come home and can’t speak on those candidates, it makes you feel bad,” Prater said.
Quadaire Patterson, a Richmond resident, said that not allowing people to vote makes no sense to him. His voting rights were restored last month.
“If you go to tribal nations, even when they incarcerate their people, they still allow them to vote,” Patterson said. “I think that this mechanism [removing the rights of convicted felons] has been employed and exacerbated by white supremacy.”
Patterson said that until he entered prison, he had no idea how many Black people were disproportionately incarcerated.
“The system convicts who they want, so now we’re starting to press in play disenfranchising people like a machine,” Patterson said.
Patterson noted that the over 66,000 people who Spanberger restored voting rights to greater than the population of 82% of the counties in Virginia.
“Getting my rights restored was just another step, because now I have to try to get these people who also just got their rights restored to go vote,” Patterson said.
Patterson runs Brilliance Behind Bars, a nonprofit organization that works with current and formerly incarcerated people to have their voting rights restored.
Legislative Journey to the Ballot
Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, had continuously introduced the constitutional amendment in the Senate for years. She said that late Sen. Yvonne Miller was the one to get the “ball rolling.”
Locke said although constitutional amendments can only be introduced on odd years, she introduced the amendment each year to keep it on people’s radar.
For a constitutional amendment to make the ballot in Virginia, it must pass through the General Assembly in two successive legislative sessions.
In 2019, the amendment passed through the House and Senate, but did not pass the House in the following year.
“Many of the questions that were being raised were things like, ‘Why can’t it just be nonviolent felons?’ ‘Why can’t individuals pay their fines and fees first or serve out their probationary term before their rights are restored?’” Locke said.
Locke believes it is important for people to know that this amendment would ensure that anyone in Virginia 18 years or older has the constitutional right to vote, and that right can not be abridged by law.
“This is the last vestige of Jim Crow that has stayed in the constitution,” Locke said. “It was deliberately put in there in 1902 to ensure certain categories of people could not vote.”
Sheba Williams, founder of Nolef Turns, said that prior to July 31, there was uncertainty around who would be eligible to have their rights restored. She said that in the Youngkin administration, it was almost “non-existent.”
Nolef Turns is a nonprofit organization with the mission of reducing recidivism by supporting and advocating with people in court and justice involvement, according to their website.
Recidivism is the committing of a crime after being released from incarceration, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
“There’s been inconsistency across the board with administrations around the restoration of rights process, and we never know what we’re going to get,” Williams said. “It’s not necessarily that it’s a difficult process, it’s inconsistent and unknown from administration to administration.”
Williams said Virginia is an outlier in the nation, being the only state that relies on the sitting governor to make a decision about each individual restoration of rights case.
The same amendment has been submitted every year in the Virginia General Assembly, according to Williams. A similar bill passed both chambers of the legislature in 2022, but was voted down by a House Privileges and Elections Subcommittee, according to Ballotpedia.
“A lot of people think the worst of the worst when they hear a person committed a crime because it has been driven into people’s heads,” Williams said.Williams said that there are several factors for why a person may become a felon that are not necessarily their fault, including plea deals, wrongful incarceration, poverty or mental health issues.
“The idea of felony disenfranchisement came from the 3/5ths compromise, where you’re saying people convicted of crimes are not morally whole people,” Williams said. “You’re saying that they’re not able to make conscious decisions about how they’re governed because they were convicted of crimes.”
Charles Kehoe, an adjunct criminal justice Professor, said that many people who are released from prison but are on probation can not vote until they complete their term.
“There’s a correlation that states that show that they have restored inmates’ voting rights or felons’ voting rights, that those people have a better recidivism,” Kehoe said.
Kehoe said that if people do not get their voting rights restored, they may feel disenfranchised from the community, as opposed to people who were reenfranchised, who could feel like an “investment” in the community.
David Coogan, associate professor of English and founder and co-director of Open Minds, noted the correlation between slavery disenfranchising of people and the state disenfranchising people with felonies.
“Virginia was one of the holdouts, just kept the old way of thinking of continuing to disenfranchise people because they went through prison/slavery,” Coogan said.
Open Minds is a collaboration between the Richmond City Sheriff’s Office and Virginia Commonwealth University, offering dual enrollment courses in English, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Religious Studies to people in Richmond City Jail.
“A lot of people that I met through my writing classes at Richmond City Jail were incarcerated at a time where Obama was running for president,” Coogan said. “Most of the men that I met at the jail were Black men, who were not allowed to vote for the first Black president. That was huge psychologically.”