ACLU Pressure Registrars to Illegally Allow Out-of-State College Students to Vote in Virginia
Posted on October 14, 2008
Of course this is illegal, but that won’t stop the ACLU from a good conspiracy and maybe a lawsuit.
Tracy Howard, Radford’s registrar, is paying special attention to voter registration applications that cite a Radford University dorm room as a potential voter’s address, but a student organization and the ACLU of Virginia say that’s illegal.
Howard says he’s following Virginia law the same way he has for 16 years.“If they give me only a dorm address,” he said, “they will be sent something called a pending denial. It says that you need to have a street address, permanent address, in order to register to vote.”
Kent Willis, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said, “This can only be construed as an attempt to dissuade students from registering to vote in Radford or a ploy to trick them into providing contradictory information that could stall the registration process past the deadline.”
Virginia registrars rarely have problems with students registering to vote, Willis said.
“When they care is when students are geared up to register in large numbers,” he said. “Suddenly, that upsets the whole local power structure.”
Across the country, new voters, particularly young voters, are registering in record numbers, most of them to cast ballots in the presidential race.
Howard says student registration drives are an issue. Groups conducting these drives “have at best simply misinformed on-campus individuals and at worst lied to them” about registration rules, he wrote in his response to the ACLU. They are also holding applications longer than they’re supposed to and flooding Howard’s office with them.
In a letter to Howard on Monday, Rebecca Glenberg, the ACLU’s legal director, cited a string of court decisions that say students can’t be treated differently from other people attempting to register to vote.
“Every individual citizen has the right to vote,” Howard responded. “No individual has the right to register to vote in a community based upon convenience, false information or lies.”
The RU Fair Voter Registration Alliance formed Sept. 15 after student Nikki Rampino registered using her dorm address and received a pending denial notice. After Rampino went to Howard’s office and complained, her application was approved. She got her voter identification card Monday.
We’ll keep our eye on this story.
» Filed Under 1st Amendment, ACLU, Democrats, Education, Elections, News, Voter/Election Fraud
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4 Responses to “ACLU Pressure Registrars to Illegally Allow Out-of-State College Students to Vote in Virginia”
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This is a tricky issue. As a student, you have a pretty legitimate claim to being a resident of the state you’re attending school in. You can also claim to be a resident of your home state, if your parents still live there and you still can use their mailing address. It’s hard for the government to be sure which is the official residence. I hate to admit it, but if we had a national ID system or national driver’s license, this would all be much more scientific!
The real question is not whether they vote in Virginia or in their home states. The question is, are they going to vote in BOTH? And if they did, would we be able to catch them?
The university certainly doesn’t consider out of state students living in their dorms grounds for granting residency in regards to tuition.
For that you would have to live in the state for one year without attending school.
And the permanent address on your school records is usually mom and dad’s–not your dorm room.
This is just another try at gaming the system. Students can request absentee ballots from their home state and vote and then vote in the state where they go to college.
It’s nonsense. It’s fraud. It’s one more very good reason to keep the electoral college.
Kay, I tend to disagree. The government cannot know whether the student has made a permanent move to a new state or intends to leave after graduation. If the student takes a job in the new state, is paying income taxes in the new state, has switched their drivers’ license to the new state’s DMV, then who are we to say that they *must* be residents of the state where their parents live?
Here’s a radical idea: what if we VOTED on our income tax returns in April instead of November. People who don’t have income don’t get to vote. 14-year-olds with summer jobs could vote, but 20-year-old students who can’t be arsed to work part time in the library WON’T vote. Hmm… maybe there’s something to this idea…
To establish residency in a state is rather easy as the federal courts have made it so. I believe merely being a resident of the state for 30 days or less will qualify you as a resident of that state if you apply for such residency. I do not know if you can have dual or multiple residencies. I still have doubts a Freshman can establish residency before the time needed to register to vote is closes but it depends on factors I am not aware of.