RICHMOND, Virginia — Within a week of leaving prison in 2024, Quadaire Patterson applied to have his right to vote restored. He waited for about two years, without success. But when he checked Virginia’s online portal this past August, there had been a big change. His status said “pending,” whereas before it had said “denied.”
Not long afterward, it changed to “approved.” His wife sent him a picture of the document confirming that Gov. Abigail Spanberger had restored the right to vote to him and 100,000 other Virginians.
But Patterson’s fight isn’t over. Virginia is one of three states where the governor controls the restoration of voting rights for people with felony convictions. Unlike Iowa and Kentucky, where standing executive orders automatically restore that right to broad groups of people, Virginia has no such guarantee.
This November, Virginians will have the opportunity to end such felony disenfranchisement. After a yearslong campaign, a proposed constitutional amendment would guarantee voting as a fundamental right and automatically restore that right to people convicted of felonies once they leave prison, eliminating the requirement that they first receive approval from the governor.
“I’ve rejoined society. I can say that I have full citizenship,” Patterson, 38, told Capital B. “That’s been transformative to me.”
The burden of felony disenfranchisement falls disproportionately on Black Virginians. An estimated 264,000 Virginians were disenfranchised because of felony convictions in 2024, according to the Sentencing Project. About 121,000 of them, or nearly half, were Black.
Put differently, an estimated 1 in 10 Black voting-eligible Virginians was disenfranchised, a rate that was 3.5 times that of non-Black Virginians. Black Virginians make up about 18% of the state’s population, but nearly 52% of its prison population.
Patterson spent 16 years of a 20-year sentence for a robbery in prison, where he developed a political awareness he said that he lacked when he was younger. While incarcerated, he founded Brilliance Behind Bars, an organization that works with people in prison and those returning home.
Now, equipped with that awareness and his right to vote, his thoughts are laser-focused on November — on whether Virginians will make the restoration of this right something that no future governor can unilaterally decide.
The proposal has faced some Republican opposition. Critics argue that automatic restoration on release from prison is a bridge too far because it would apply regardless of the seriousness of the felony and while some people are still completing parole or probation. During a House debate in January, Republican Del. Eric Phillips argued that people convicted of the most serious violent crimes should be treated differently.
“There are violent felons, murderers, people who snuff out the rights of others to ever be able to do anything again in this lifetime, who should be exempted,” Phillips said.
A referendum on Virginia ballots
For years, voting rights advocates in Virginia and some lawmakers have pushed to end felony disenfranchisement. Their latest effort cleared a big hurdle in 2025, when the General Assembly approved the constitutional amendment for the first time, and again this January, when it approved it for a second time, kicking the question to voters.
Among those pushing from outside the legislature is Sheba Williams, a Richmond-based advocate who, like Patterson, knows what it means to live in and contribute to a community while being unable to vote.
In 2008, when Barack Obama was campaigning to become the country’s first Black president, Williams was registering people to vote, knocking doors, and going to rallies.
But Williams couldn’t cast a ballot. A felony conviction in 2004 for embezzlement, which she maintains was wrongful, had stripped her of her right to vote, ultimately leaving her disenfranchised for nine years.
“This was a historic moment for the Black community,” Williams, 47, told Capital B from her Richmond office. “I won’t say that I agreed with all his policies, but it was historic to know that a Black person could lead the country. And I couldn’t participate. That’s something that has stuck with me for years.”
Williams had her right to vote restored in 2013, under Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who that year had helped to streamline the process for people convicted of nonviolent felonies. Three years later, she founded Nolef Turns (“Nolef” is “felon” written backward), and has worked with people returning from prison.
To Williams, part of the problem with the current system is that there’s no guarantee that one governor will handle restoration the same way as the next. McDonnell’s successors continued to expand and streamline restoration, but former Gov. Glenn Youngkin — a Republican who was in office from 2022 to 2026 — changed course. He had no concrete criteria in place, and changed the application process on several different occasions.
“We don’t know what we’re going to get from one administration to the next,” Williams said. “And anytime there’s not a reliable system — anytime there’s not a reliable process — there’s a problem.”
A Jim Crow relic
The roots of the racial disparity in felony disenfranchisement lie in the years just after the Civil War, when newly freed Black men secured the right to vote and became a major political force in Virginia. When the state was readmitted to the Union in 1870, Congress sought to protect that voting rights gain by limiting the kinds of crimes that could result in disenfranchisement.
Virginia undermined it, however. At the state’s 1901-1902 constitutional convention, white leaders not only imposed poll taxes and other restrictions designed to limit Black voting power — they also enshrined a lifetime voting ban for anyone convicted of any felony. This standard fell particularly hard on Black Virginians.
One of those convention leaders, future U.S. Sen. Carter Glass, made the gathering’s racial purpose explicit: “That, exactly, is what this convention was elected for — to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally,” Glass said.
That Jim Crow-era constitution was replaced in 1971, but the provision about felony disenfranchisement survived. This January, a federal judge ruled that Virginia had continued to violate the terms of its readmission to the Union through its rigid disenfranchisement regime.
Dismantling a Jim Crow relic
Virginians who have experienced disenfranchisement, along with their allies, have been trying to sever the state constitution’s Jim Crow-era provision for years, in part because changing Virginia’s constitution is a multiyear process.
An amendment must pass both chambers of the General Assembly, survive an intervening House of Delegates election, and then pass both chambers again before voters have the opportunity to consider it.
“I started this process back around 2010,” Democratic state Sen. Mamie Locke, the chief Senate patron of this year’s restoration amendment, told Capital B. “And before me, it was [Democratic] state Sen. Yvonne Miller who put in legislation asking for the automatic restoration of voting rights.”
The effort has advanced and stalled in the years since, Locke explained. She and other lawmakers came close to putting automatic restoration before voters earlier this decade, only to see the measure die after Republicans won control of the House of Delegates in 2021.
Locke and her allies also have changed their strategy for achieving their goal over the years. Around 2019, they shifted from focusing solely on restoring the voting rights of people with felony convictions. They began examining what the older incarnation of the constitution said, and didn’t say, about voting, searching for another way to approach the issue.
“We decided to take a little bit of a different tactic,” Locke said. “We decided to take a hard look at the 1902 Constitution.”
That examination revealed that Virginia’s constitution doesn’t explicitly establish a right to vote. The amendment Virginians will consider this fall would do that, as well as guarantee automatic restoration of the right to vote on release from incarceration for those with felony convictions.
“It’s time to go vote”
Advocates of the amendment are approaching November with the same focus that has animated their efforts in the past.
Through Nolef Turns, Williams has been working to educate Virginians about what the amendment would do and to persuade people who have experienced disenfranchisement that they have a stake in the vote.
When Capital B spoke with Williams in her office in September, she was sitting at her desk, surrounded by boxes and papers, preparing for the Virginia Justice Conference, a three-day gathering Nolef Turns was organizing in Richmond beginning the next morning. The event would bring together formerly incarcerated people, advocates, and lawmakers for civic education, advocacy training, and discussions about the constitutional amendment.
For Williams, that outreach will remain vital even if voters approve the amendment, at least in the immediate weeks that follow. Changing the state constitution would eliminate one barrier to the ballot box, she said, but advocates would still have to make sure that formerly incarcerated people with felony convictions know that their right to vote has been restored.
“Getting people to pay attention — that’s the work,” she said. Because to her, the ballot reaches far beyond the voting booth. “Everything that is essential to living in life is tied to that vote.”
Patterson has his gaze trained on that same work.
“It’s time to go vote,” he recalled thinking after learning that his right to vote had been restored. “It’s time to go out there and try to change the constitution so that we don’t have to worry about this.”
