After a confusing legal back-and-forth, some 70,000 ex-offenders are believed to be newly registered to vote – potentially affecting several important House races

Tammie Hagen has a secret code for finding felons. Touring the streets of Richmond on her bicycle, the 51-year-old former restaurant manager stops Virginians and asks if they are registered to vote.

If the answer is “I can’t”, she follows up with the stigma-sensitive phrase: “Are you still on supervision?”

It elicits a knowing response from those who, like her, want to take part in democracy but have been barred in their millions across the US, due to a brush with the criminal justice system at some point in their lives.

As the deadline approaches for registering to take part in one of the most consequential US elections in a generation, Virginia is the exception to controversial state rules that ban those convicted of a felony from voting.

The state’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, had to circumvent Republican-led attempts in the state supreme court to block a blanket amnesty, and he did so by individually clearing felons to vote – one signature at a time. An estimated 70,000 ex-offenders are now thought to have been registered to vote before the deadline of 17 October.

In the presidential election, Virginia – a state Donald Trump once hoped to win – looks so far out of reach that Trump’s campaign is reported to have pulled out. But several tightening House races there could yet make the difference in the battle for control of Congress.

The on-off nature of the restoration of rights in Virginia has confused many. Thirteen thousand former offenders who registered to vote when McAuliffe first attempted an automatic clearance were later told they had been disenfranchised once again, when the court ruled his executive action was in breach of the state constitution.

Hence the effort through individual signatures, as groups such as New Virginia Majority, for which Hagen now works, are scrambling to find suitable candidates for gubernatorial clemency. The effort is as much about overcoming weary cynicism as getting paperwork to the governor’s office in time.

“It felt pretty bleak,” says Hagen as she describes reaction to the first setback. “People were really discouraged. I came across lots who were reluctant to try again. ‘It’s not going to happen,’ they’d say, ‘my vote’s not going to happen.’”

It is a feeling with which she can sympathise, as she says she had “consigned” herself “to never voting in my life”, thanks to a string of “petty drug offences” that led to her first felony conviction at 25 and a last one six or seven years ago.

But rehabilitation led to a conviction that ex-offenders deserve to play a role in political life. Hagen estimates she has registered 600-800 Virginians and submitted “several hundred requests” for restoration of voting rights to the governor’s office.

In the north of the state, where Democrats are targeting several House seats once seen as impossibly out of reach, on Tuesday volunteers knocking on doors registered 200 new voters out of the Alexandria office alone.

But this last-minute rush for electors is not welcomed by all. A few miles from Alexandria, a leading conservative critic of the governor’s policy is deeply uncomfortable with what he sees as a nakedly partisan attempt to enfranchise voters who largely lean Democratic.

“If you are not willing to follow the law then you can’t demand a right to make the law for everyone else, which is what voting is about,” says Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity.

“You can’t assume somebody has turned over a new leaf once they have walked out of prison.”

Clegg is particularly scathing of the argument that preventing ex-offenders from voting is a ploy to limit the voice of African Americans in politics.

“The fact that felons are disproportionately this or that colour does not make these rules racist any more than the fact that felons are disproportionately male makes these laws sexist,” he argues.

Even the harshest critics of the reforms concede that a rush of new faces to the polls can also be a sign of a healthy democracy. They would simply prefer more stringent tests before the right is restored.

“The best argument that the other side has to make is that it is important to do what we can to reintegrate felons back into society and it certainly would be a bad thing if society sent a message that once you have committed a felony your civil life is over,” Clegg says.

“But the automatic reinfranchisement of felons misses an opportunity to do that kind of reintegration. There should be a ceremony like a naturalisation ceremony, where you go down to the courthouse and the person brings their friends and family around and everyone has a little American flag. That would be meaningful.”

For those on the streets trying to persuade ex-offenders to give democracy a second chance, there is plenty of meaning in the process already.

“These are folks who have been systematically kicked out of the system, who have been ignored,” says Matthew Rogers, regional field director of New Virginia Majority in Alexandria.

“Many of them do not even know their rights have been restored. So many of them break down in tears they are so excited.”