Sitting in her tidy Henrico County living room, Amber Brown says she struggled with addiction and mental health issues before landing in state custody.
After being released from her second stint at the Virginia Department of Corrections in 2022, Brown recounted living in a “nightmare” apartment and having a tough time finding gainful employment because of the stigma that comes along with being formerly incarcerated.
She called it a “life sentence.”
Like anyone in the Commonwealth who’s been convicted of a felony, Brown also lost her right to vote. A November ballot initiative, one of three proposed state constitutional amendments, would change how people in Virginia regain that right.
The Virginia General Assembly previously passed legislation to automatically restore voting rights to those who’ve completed a felony sentence; the upcoming ballot measure is the next step required in the process to amend the state constitution. If approved by voters, automatic restorations would begin Jan. 1, 2027.
“I personally have faced a lot of barriers since I have been released,” Brown said, her dog barking in a back bedroom. “You come home, you have barriers to housing, you have barriers to employment, you have barriers to your civil rights. It's really like your sentence never ends. And so, I'm very happy to see leaders that are willing to see that people are worthy of second chances and, coming back into society and being a part of society.”
Brown said her voting rights were restored in August without making application, though she wasn’t notified and simply happened to check a state website where residents can access the information.
“It all happened just out of nowhere, really,” Brown said. “It was like, ‘Oh, all of a sudden Abigail is restoring people’s rights.’”
Currently, the restoration process is at the discretion of the sitting governor — an arrangement that makes Virginia unique across the country. Gov. Abigail Spanberger, though, has proactively restored ballot access to about 100,000 disenfranchised voters, contrasting with her predecessor.
During an August appearance at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the governor called the current process a “shameful relic of Virginia’s Jim Crow past.”
“In our democracy, our vote is how we make our voices heard, and the proof of that is in the fact that people have worked so hard throughout history to deny others the vote, to silence their voice,” Spanberger said.
Voting was largely restricted during the 18th and 19th centuries, giving affluent white men outsized political influence. That extended to the Civil War’s aftermath, when the U.S. Congress OK’d the Virginia Readmission Act of 1870, allowing the Commonwealth to return to the fold. But the legislation carved out a way to restrict ballot access for those who had committed “such crimes as are now felonies at common law.” A 1902 update of the state constitution reinforced barriers for Black and poor Virginians to access political power.
“It does not just affect one race or another,” Sheba Williams said at Nolef Turns’ Henrico office. “It does not just affect a Democrat or Republican.”
Williams and her nonprofit offer assistance to formerly incarcerated people as they adapt to life following their sentences. She also lobbies around state-level criminal justice reform and has been critical of the state’s current restoration process.
“We're saying that people are never worthy of redemption. We do not offer mercy and grace for people who are imperfect,” Williams said. “And, you know, I will stand by and live by the mantra that every person is worthy of redemption.”
In addition to regaining the right to fully participate in democracy, Williams discussed wide-ranging obstacles people face when returning home from prison, echoing themes Brown described as she traced her experiences.
It’s this combination of hardships that potentially helped galvanize advocates of the amendment.
Supporters of the change have raised about $669,000 to help boost the initiative, while those opposing the amendment reported putting together about $8,400, according to Virginia Public Access Project data.
Some in the GOP have said they don’t object to the amendment’s premise, but allowing people who owe restitution or are on parole doesn’t put “victims first.”
Earlier this summer, Del. Mike Cherry, a Republican representing Colonial Heights, said he’d worked on criminal justice issues since first being elected to the House and described himself as an outlier on the amendment within his own party.
“My perspective is that your constitutional rights should never be tied to a criminal behavior outcome. I think that was a misstep when it was done originally for whatever reason it was done. There's a lot of speculation whether that was racial or other issues of why it was done,” he said. “Your constitutional rights should be very, very sacrosanct. They should be very hard to take away and you should get them back as quickly as possible.”
A 2023 class action lawsuit seeking to reduce the number of crimes that could result in an individual losing their ballot access in the commonwealth was decided in favor of the ACLU of Virginia earlier this year. After U.S. District Court Judge John A. Gibney sided with the nonprofit civil rights group in January, a later filing admonished the state and the Board of Elections for not adequately following the court’s ruling.
“Continued discouragement of registration by felons may eventually justify judicial intervention,” Gibney wrote.
On Sept. 15, the elections department updated its policies and limited the disqualifying felonies to murder, and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter, likely enabling thousands in Virginia to register.
If the ballot initiative’s approved, this parallel legal fight won’t be moot: Virginia will still be required to update wording on voter registration documents. But as Chris Kaiser, ACLU of Virginia’s policy director, explained, voting rights also affect other segments of public life.
“You can serve in state government if you've been convicted of a felony, but only if your voting rights have been restored,” he said. “And to serve on a jury, for that matter, it's a similar thing. A lot of these other civil rights in Virginia are bound up with [a person’s] right to vote.”
Kaiser also pointed to recent state legislation from the 2026 session that created a notification process for the formerly incarcerated, so people like Amber Brown would be contacted about their ability to vote.
“I do want to see people getting their rights back,” Brown said. “I feel like the system kind of makes it really hard to be successful, and you tell people that you want them to do well when they come home from incarceration, but then you put every barrier in place for them to be able to do well.”