On July 31, 2026 C.E., Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger had restored the civil rights of 66,085 state residents with felony convictions since taking office in January — a figure that reflects both an executive policy shift and a landmark federal court ruling that reshaped who can vote in Virginia at all.
At a glance
- Voting rights restoration: Spanberger’s office restored civil rights — including the right to vote, serve on a jury, run for public office, and become a notary public — to 66,085 Virginians with felony convictions between January 17 and July 31, 2026 C.E.
- Felony disenfranchisement ruling: A federal judge ruled in January 2026 C.E. that Virginia’s constitutional ban on voting for people with felony convictions violates the Virginia Readmission Act of 1870 C.E., a Reconstruction-era federal law — effectively making most Virginians with past convictions eligible to vote without applying to the governor at all.
- November ballot measure: Virginia voters will decide on November 3, 2026 C.E. whether to amend the state constitution to restore voting rights upon release from prison, contingent on completing parole, probation, and payment of fines.
The scale of the change becomes clearer when compared to Spanberger’s immediate predecessor. Governor Glenn Youngkin, who served from 2022 to 2026 C.E., ended the proactive restoration process used by the three governors before him and required individuals to apply for rights restoration case by case. He restored voting rights to fewer than 10,000 Virginians across his entire four-year term. Spanberger surpassed that total in her first six and a half months.
A proactive shift in policy
Spanberger’s approach does not require people to apply. Her office directed the Secretary of the Commonwealth to identify eligible individuals and restore their rights automatically — a process used, with variations, by Governors Bob McDonnell, Terry McAuliffe, and Ralph Northam before Youngkin ended it.
McDonnell automatically restored rights for people with nonviolent convictions who had completed their sentence, probation, and parole. McAuliffe extended that review to all felony convictions. Northam expanded it further by removing the parole-completion requirement. Spanberger’s return to a proactive process builds on that lineage.
Virginia’s constitution, which dated its lifetime voting ban to the 1901–02 Constitutional Convention, had long made the governor the sole restoration mechanism for most people with felony convictions. That history is now substantially different.
The court ruling that changed the landscape
The more sweeping change came not from the governor’s office but from a federal courtroom. On January 22, 2026 C.E., U.S. District Court Judge John Gibney of the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that Virginia’s constitutional felony-disenfranchisement provision violates the Virginia Readmission Act of 1870 C.E. — a Reconstruction-era federal law that allowed Virginia to disenfranchise citizens only for crimes that were felonies at common law at the time.
The case was brought by plaintiffs Tati King and Toni Johnson. Judge Gibney certified a statewide class, granted summary judgment, and entered a permanent injunction effective May 1, 2026 C.E. A federal judge upheld the ruling again on March 11, 2026 C.E.
Under the ruling, Virginia may disenfranchise only for 11 crimes that were felonies at common law in 1870 C.E.: arson, burglary, escape or rescue from a prison or jail, larceny, manslaughter, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery, sodomy, and suicide. Anyone convicted of any other felony is now eligible to vote and does not need to apply to the governor.
The ruling’s language was direct. “For well over a century,” Judge Gibney wrote, “the Commonwealth of Virginia has disobeyed a federal law designed to protect the right of former enslaved people to vote.” An ACLU attorney described it as “a historic ruling” that removes “one of the remaining vestiges of Jim Crow in Virginia.”
Before the ruling, roughly 260,000 Virginians could not vote because of felony convictions, according to The Sentencing Project. Civil rights advocates noted that one in 10 Black voters in Virginia faced disenfranchisement — a disparity rooted in enforcement patterns that long predated 2026 C.E. Virginia was, until the May 2026 C.E. injunction took effect, among a small number of states whose constitution permanently disenfranchised all citizens with past felony convictions while placing restoration power solely in the governor’s hands.
This is one story among many voting rights advances in recent years — from automatic registration laws to court-ordered reforms — that reflect a slow but measurable broadening of democratic participation in the United States.
What comes next
On November 3, 2026 C.E., Virginia voters will decide whether to enshrine restoration rights in the state constitution. The ballot question asks whether to “restore voting rights to all formerly-incarcerated voters upon release from prison and upon completion of further actions required of them.” Those further actions include completing parole and probation and paying any outstanding fines.
The amendment cleared the General Assembly in two consecutive sessions — 2025 C.E. and 2026 C.E. — as Virginia’s constitution requires for amendments to go to voters.
The outcome is not assured. Virginia voters rejected a similar measure in 1982 C.E. by 63% to 37%. And the fines-and-restitution condition means that some people who have completed their prison sentences would still not regain the vote until they can pay — a limitation that voting rights advocates at the Brennan Center for Justice and others have flagged as a barrier that falls disproportionately on people with fewer financial resources.
Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones was also weighing whether to appeal the January court ruling, which remains a live variable. Advocates have urged the state not to challenge a decision that expanded voting access for hundreds of thousands of Virginians.
Still, the distance traveled in 2026 C.E. is real. A governor has restored civil rights to more than 66,000 people in six months. A federal court has ruled that most of Virginia’s lifetime voting ban was illegal from the start. And voters will soon decide whether to make restoration automatic — with conditions — for everyone leaving incarceration in the state. Each of those developments, taken on its own, would have seemed unlikely a decade ago.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Ballotpedia News
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights secured for 160 million hectares at COP30
- U.K. cancer death rates fall to their lowest level on record
- The Good News for Humankind archive on voting rights
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