Restoration of Rights Process

An individual is eligible to apply to have his/her rights restored by the Governor if he/she has been convicted of a felony and is no longer incarcerated.
Individuals who would like to have their civil rights restored are encouraged to contact the Secretary of the Commonwealth (SOC) through the website.
The SOC works with other various state agencies to consider who may be eligible to have their rights restored.
All individuals, who apply to have their rights restored, will be thoroughly reviewed by the SOC, including checking their records with various state agencies to ensure the individual meets the Governor’s standards for restoration of rights.
Upon the Governor’s approval, SOC will issue personalized restoration orders to individuals.

Are your rights restored?

Anyone convicted of a felony in Virginia automatically loses their civil rights - the right to vote, serve on a jury, run for office, become a notary public and carry a firearm. The Constitution of Virginia gives the Governor the sole discretion to restore civil rights, not including firearm rights. Individuals seeking restoration of their civil rights are encouraged to contact the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office.

Check the Status of Your Civil Rights

Request Your Rights Be Restored

Printable Contact Form

What is Google Translate?

Google Translate is a third-party service provided by Google that performs all translations directly and dynamically. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be. This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called “statistical machine translation”. Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyze in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will vary across languages.

Disclaimer

The Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) website is providing the “Google Translate” option to assist you in reading the website in languages other than English. For these translations, reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate translation, however, no automated translation is perfect nor is it intended to replace human translators. These translations are provided as a service to users of the VITA website, and are provided "as is." No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, or correctness of any of these translations made from English into any other language. Some content (such as images, videos, Flash, etc.) may not be accurately translated due to the limitations of the translation software.

Any discrepancies or differences created in translating this content from English into another language are not binding and have no legal effect for compliance, enforcement, or any other purpose. If any questions arise related to the accuracy of the information contained in these translations, please refer to the English version of the website.

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