State's Proposed Voting Rules in Need of Some Work

When the General Assembly amended the state law relating to voter registration, the idea was to come up with rules that could be applied uniformly across the state. That’s the obvious intent of the laws on voter registration — treat all eligible voters the same.

But who is eligible and who is not? When it comes to college students who want to register to vote in their college towns, the answer has been elusive. It remains so.

A task force assembled by the State Board of Elections has recommended a proposal that would provide uniformity around the state, but it falls far short of resolving the issue. A trip back to the drawing board would be in order for that task force, which offered its recommendation last week.

College students who wanted to vote — or more likely who were recruited by one side or the other to vote — in last year’s presidential election raised the issue. Local registrars in college communities such as Radford, Harrisonburg and Norfolk all took different approaches to registering students. Some of them asked students, who included those who lived outside Virginia, to fill out questionnaires about their residency status.

Further, students were turned away from registrars’ offices — and the right to vote for the first time — because they gave college dormitory addresses as their permanent voting address.

In Lynchburg, however, thousands of Liberty University students registered to vote for the first time with few complications. Only those applications that were illegible were rejected. The result was more than 4,000 students added to the city’s voting rolls, with some 3,000 of them listing dormitory addresses.

Under the proposed new regulations, questionnaires won’t be permitted. And, in an effort to remove virtually all barriers to student voters, the task force has proposed that a voter’s home is any place he or she says it is as far as voter registration is concerned.

A dormitory room could be regarded as home, even though the student’s drivers license shows another home address. Under the new rules, the only way voter registrars could challenge the dormitory room address is if the applicant listed another address on the form.

The proposed new rules will be sent to the State Board of Elections, which can accept, modify or reject them.

One of the task force members raised a good reason for rejecting the rule that allows students or other voters to claim their home is wherever they say it is.

Tracy Howard, Radford’s voter registrar, said the proposed regulations would allow people to “float their vote” and to do so frequently.

The proposal, she said, would allow “any individual (to) choose their domicile for any given length of time.” She offered this example of how that would work:

“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.”

The concept of domicile is a key provision in the voter registration issue.

Howard suggested that domicile is defined as a person’s principal place of residence and whether the person intends to remain there indefinitely.

Would most college students affirm that they are going to remain in a dorm room indefinitely? Certainly not. But in terms of becoming eligible to vote in the next election, could that be their intent when they fill out a registration form? Who knows.

The task force still has some work to do on this issue. The good news is that the new regulations, whatever they may be, can’t become effective until the U.S. Department of Justice approves them. And that’s not likely to occur before the Nov. 3 elections.