NORFOLK, Va. — Sam Harris, a 56-year-old from Suffolk, will vote for the first time this November.

Harris spent nearly 25 years behind bars and was released in 2024 via a conditional pardon — a rare action from a governor that modifies or ends a prison sentence — from then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. But his right to vote wasn’t immediately restored.

Virginia is the only state that permanently strips people convicted of felonies of their right to vote unless the governor restores that right.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who served in office from 2014 to 2018, issued an executive order automatically restoring the right to vote to people who had completed their sentences and periods of probation or parole. The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled against that order, but McAuliffe’s administration streamlined the process, to check only for whether people had completed their court-ordered actions, and individually restored the rights of more than 170,000 people over the course of his term.

McAuliffe’s successor, Gov. Ralph Northam, expanded that process. But Youngkin rolled it back, and his administration evaluated individual applications for rights restoration on a case-by-case basis. Over his term, he restored the rights of about 10,000 people.

Harris applied for a pardon in 2018 but was denied under the Northam administration. Youngkin’s administration reopened the case. But a pardon doesn’t guarantee that someone’s voting rights will be restored. In fact, Youngkin did not approve Harris’s application for voting right restoration.

“I remember getting the letter, it was in October when I was getting ready to celebrate my first birthday home, and I remember getting that letter late on a Friday,” Harris said.

Harris said the governor’s office reached out to tell him he could reapply for voting rights restoration and to keep up the good work. The letter itself didn’t specify why his application had been denied.

“I guess I could see the politicalness behind it,” Harris said. “It frustrated me a little bit.”

Gov. Abigail Spanberger undid Youngkin’s stricter policy on voting restoration, reinstating the process to proactively identify Virginians who have lost the right to vote and streamlining the online application process. That also meant removing the requirement that applicants disclose whether they have paid all fines and fees.

Since taking office in January, she restored the rights of more than 100,000 people, including Harris.

“The governor has the sole discretion over whether the restoration process is transparent or done behind closed doors, whether it is easy to apply or deliberately complicated,” she said during remarks at a commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington last month. “The governor has the sole discretion over whether the voices of some Virginians can be heard at the ballot box.”

Spanberger called that system a “shameful relic of Virginia’s Jim Crow past.”

This November, Harris will vote in favor of a proposed constitutional amendment that would automatically restore the right to vote for everyone upon completion of their sentence — no longer at the discretion of any governor.

“Once I pay my debt, shouldn’t I have a chance?” he said. “I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to be pampered, but it’s like, I’m still a citizen regardless, and I still should be able to cast a vote … I don’t think we should have to pay the price for the rest of our lives.”

The constitutional amendment question reads: Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended (i) to provide for the fundamental right to vote in the Commonwealth, (ii) to revise the qualifications of voters so that a person convicted of a felony is not entitled to vote during his period of incarceration but is automatically invested with the right to vote upon release from incarceration, and (iii) to update the existing prohibition on voting by persons found to be mentally incompetent to instead apply to persons who have been found to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting?

“I can’t wait until November to go and get me a little sticker at the finish,” Harris said.

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