Santia Nance (left) sits with husband Quadaire Patterson (right) in their living room in Henrico County in September 2024. (Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)
Santia Nance and Gin Carter said they haven’t washed a single dish since their partners were released from prison.
As both loathe the household chore, Nance’s husband Quadaire Patterson and Carter’s husband Taj Mahon-Haft have been more than happy to take it on.
While Carter is in her fourth year of veterinarian school, Mahon-Haft said doing the dishes is just one more way to support her after she emotionally supported him through his incarceration.
The couples were part of a multi-group effort to change state law expanding pathways for early release of incarcerated people who meet certain criteria. They also made friends along the way as people were released this past July through expansions to Earned Sentence Credits — a way that people with good behavior and who participate in educational advancements can trim some of their prison sentences. Despite initial opposition to its expansions in 2022, Gov. Glenn Youngkin allowed its implementation this year.
Amid navigating these new chapters in their lives, some have petitioned for a chance to vote in this year’s elections. Several of them say they have little hope they will be able to.
Constitutionally disenfranchised
In Virginia’s Constitution, people with felony convictions are all but permanently disenfranchised unless a governor pardons them or restores their rights.
Former Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, along with former democratic Govs. Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, had streamlined the process and eventually made people automatically eligible for rights restoration if their sentence was complete. Then Youngkin quietly adjusted the process, requiring individuals to submit petitions to regain their rights, resulting in lower restoration numbers compared to previous administrations.
The exact criteria the governor considers when granting or rejecting applications remains unclear.
Virginia’s chapter of the NAACP took Youngkin’s administration to court last year to get answers but a judge ruled that most details are exempt from being shared through a provision in the Freedom of Information Act.
But what was shared in the administration’s FOIA response indicated that people who have completed probation and paid any due fines might be more likely to get a “yes” from him. An applicant disclosed in the FOIA who was classified “ineligible at this time” was still on probation and paying fines.
Then-spokeswoman for the governor, Macaulay Porter, told media at the time that the administration had acted “in good faith” in disclosing the information that it did provide.
Still, applicants aren’t fully aware of what exact criteria they’d need to meet in order to be restored. In interviews with The Mercury, formerly incarcerated people shared their lingering questions about whether their rights will be restored — including if their offense type matters as a disqualifier, if probation and fines are indeed a component, or if their potential good standing and public service to their community might be a factor in their favor.
Some also wonder if the “individual basis” petition review system the administration has reiterated over the past year is actually happening.
Copy-and-paste rejections
According to the partially-filled FOIA, a “reentry resource packet” people are given when they leave prison includes a paper informing them to apply for their rights to be restored. Though there’s no indication of the time it would take in that packet, other materials in the FOIA show it can take two to three months as various state agencies are involved in the process.
About three months after applying for restoration, Newport News resident Justin Brown received an email with a rejection letter addressed “Dear applicant,” which didn’t describe why he was rejected.
The message was part of a mass email response the Youngkin administration sent to several hundred people who had applied for rights restoration; all of their email addresses were visible to everyone who’d gotten the message. The applicants began to chat in the email thread, revealing a series of concerns and questions about their access to the ballot box.
“I believe each and every one of us has a right to know why we were denied,” said one of the respondents.
Screenshot of a response from Newport News resident Justin Brown to an email chain of people with felony convictions whose voting rights were not restored. (Courtesy Justin Brown)
Several speculated they were denied because of this year’s high profile federal elections. Some posited that the process isn’t handled on an individual basis, since they were all mass emailed with the same generic rejection letter.
Some respondents noted that like the governor, they are Republicans too.
One such would-be Republican voter called it an “insult to injury” to not be able to vote while, as a former felon, he also struggles to find work that would put the medic training he gained during his military service to use.
“Once I started talking with everyone else and seeing that this is a pattern of this administration, I wanted to raise some alarm bells,” Brown said in an interview with The Mercury.
He reached out to his state lawmaker, Del. Cia Price, D-Newport News, who said she contacted the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Kelly Gee. Price told The Mercury that she had a conversation with Gee wherein the secretary apologized for the email error and stressed that while the alert to Brown and others had been done in mass, the restorations are handled on an individual basis.
Brown said that he filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice (which is also currently suing Virginia over a purge of voter registrations too close to Election Day). He hopes the DOJ could investigate the restoration process to ensure that it’s indeed being handled on a case-by-case basis, which the mass email put into question for him.
Unclear criteria
Several other people with felony records told The Mercury they don’t recall getting mail or emails about their rejections.
Mahon-Haft, who has applied twice, discovered his latest rejection through checking an online portal. He doesn’t know why he was rejected, but he is still on probation. Patterson, who is also still on probation, hasn’t applied yet.
“Our constitution has this antiquated language for a governor to determine your destiny,” Patterson said. “We’ve finished our sentences, but there’s this extra sentence that carries on.”
Jared Rose, a Roanoke resident who works for a state-funded nonprofit organization and serves on the city’s Gun Violence Prevention Commission wonders if his probation status might result in a rejection.
He hopes to become a peer recovery specialist to help people overcome substance abuse disorders and plans to start a nonprofit to pair formerly incarcerated people as mentors with at-risk youth. When he checked his restoration status on the portal, he said there was no information, despite applying earlier in the year.
“I did a crime. I broke the law, you know, this is what I’ve got to deal with,” Rose said. “But somewhere along the line, there’s just so much red tape.”
Looking forward
Mahon-Haft can’t vote for lawmakers yet, but he will frequent Virginia’s Capitol in the next legislative session to support their work.
He and Carter had previously co-founded an organization called The Humanization Project, an advocacy group that also participates in educational programming.
Taj Mahon-Haft (left) and Gin Carter (right) on their wedding day in August 2024. Image courtesy Mahon-Haft.
“It’s easy to hate a conviction, but it’s not very easy to hate somebody when you know seven layers of them,” Mahon-Haft said. “You might have one thing you don’t agree with, but you can see them as a human being. When you see people as human beings, you have more humane policy.”
He’s grateful that Youngkin reversed his course on the Earned Sentence Credit law, for example. When announcing his own efforts to support formerly incarcerated people with re-entry this summer, Youngkin indicated that reversal was more about being in alignment with the state’s Supreme Court — which had ruled in favor of a man whose incarceration had been extended despite his earned credits that should have allowed him earlier release.
“The Supreme Court this past year was very clear on the current sentence credits, and so we’re fully complying,” Youngkin said at the time.
Just as Mahon-Haft and Carter’s relationship helped spark an organization, Nance co-founded Sistas For Prison Reform with other women whose loved ones were incarcerated. And while she and Patterson are still planning a wedding to celebrate their union, they went ahead and eloped earlier this month. Mahon-Haft and Carter wed over the summer in Southwest Virginia, with some of their recently-released friends also part of the celebration.
The couples plan to continue public engagement around the lived experiences of incarcerated people and their families, as well as advocate for laws that help people better reintegrate into society after time spent in prison.
Mahon-Haft also plans to keep applying for restoration until he gets a “yes.”
And if Democrats in Virginia’s state legislature get their wish, automatic restoration for completed sentences could be enshrined in the state’s constitution.
To do so, a constitutional amendment will need to pass the state legislature two years in a row, with an election in the House of Delegates in between, before appearing on statewide ballots for everyone else to weigh in on.
Virginia Democrats plan to kickstart that process next year, with the potential for it to appear on statewide ballots by 2026.
Brown, the Newport News resident, is already excited about the prospect and plans to visit Virginia’s Capitol to engage with lawmakers.
Until then and beyond, Mahon-Haft will continue to wash his wife’s dishes.
“At some point years ago, when he was still locked up, I had a pile of dishes in my sink, and I joked ‘You never pull your weight in this relationship — why don’t you ever do the dishes?’” Carter recalled. She remembered that Mahon-Haft told her if she stuck by him through the end of his sentence, he’d do her dishes the rest of her life.
“He’s made good on that so far!” she said.
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