Task force urges lower barrier for college kids registering to vote

A task force has recommended that the State Board of Elections lower even further Virginia’s barriers to allowing college students and other short-term residents to register to vote.

The Residency Task Force proposed Monday that a person’s home is any place he or she says it is when they fill out their voter application form, three task force members said.

Under the proposals, a dormitory room could be regarded as home, and local voter registrars couldn’t challenge such an assertion — unless an applicant also listed another address on the form.

Local registrars in college communities such as Radford, Harrisonburg and Norfolk all took different approaches to registering college students before last year’s presidential election. Some of them asked students to fill out questionnaires about their residency status.

Such questionnaires won’t be permitted under the proposed regulations, which still had not been posted on the Board of Elections’ Web site on Thursday.

The task force’s goal was to issue uniform standards that all registrars can follow. It succeeded on the uniformity goal, but may have opened other possibilities such as “floater voters,” two task force members said.

Lynchburg and Harrisonburg led the state in the number of students who registered last fall. Liberty University added nearly 3,000 on-campus students to the voting rolls at the Heritage Elementary precinct, and rounded up about 4,200 applications overall.

Although questions buzzed throughout Lynchburg about students’ permanency as residents, voting-rights groups never questioned Lynchburg’s handling of the issue.

Most of the controversy raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups were directed at such localities as Radford, Harrisonburg and Williamsburg.

The task force’s proposed regulations will be sent to the State Board of Elections, which can accept, modify or reject them.

If new regulations are accepted, they can’t officially go into effect until the U.S. Department of Justice approves them.

Those approvals are unlikely to be completed in time for the Nov. 3 elections, but several registrars said they expected groups that conduct voter registration drives to apply pressure on local registrars to observe the proposals anyway.

Tracy Howard, Radford’s voter registrar, said the task force’s key decision involved the concept of “domicile,” defined as a person’s principal place of residence and whether they intend to remain there indefinitely.

Howard said the task force “indicated that domicile, in terms of elections, means an individual’s intent” when he or she fills out a registration form.

It has nothing to do with the address on the applicant’s driver license, car registration, or in-state tuition status, Howard said.

“There is essentially nothing a registrar can do at this point to ask a question of anyone who has sent in a completed voter registration application,” Howard said.

Previously, a registrar could consider several factors in determining an individual’s domicile, Howard said, but the General Assembly amended the state code this year and directed the Board of Elections to issue statewide guidelines.

“Those factors have been removed in the state code, and therefore removed from any regulations,” Howard said.

Suzanne Obenshain, a task force member and secretary of the Harrisonburg Electoral Board, said, “I would concur” with Howard’s evaluation of the regulations.

Howard said the proposed regulations would allow people to “float their vote” and do so frequently.

Under the proposal, “any individual may choose their domicile for any given length of time,” Howard said.

“In Lynchburg, for instance, someone could be running for a City Council seat and have tons of aunts, uncles and cousins in Campbell County. Those individuals could register to vote in Lynchburg simply by indicating they have a place to stay and filling out a registration form.

“After the election is over, there is nothing to keep them from returning immediately to Campbell County,” Howard said.

“There is nothing to prevent that type of floating your vote, even though some of us tried” on the task force, Howard said.