The deadline to register to vote in May’s City Council election passed on Monday with an increase of about 1,000 voters citywide, including at least 400 new registrations with a Liberty University address tallied since March, according to preliminary numbers from the Lynchburg Registrar’s Office.
That tally does not include another 250 to 300 voter registration forms from Liberty University that arrived at the registrar’s office on Monday afternoon, just hours before the deadline, Registrar Carolyn Sherayko said on Tuesday. Workers have not yet processed those forms, which might include duplicates, Sherayko said.
The Heritage Elementary School precinct, the polling site for Liberty’s on-campus students, saw an increase of 441 voters since Feb. 1, Sherayko said. Voters listing a Liberty University address make up about 70 percent of the precinct, or 4,251 of the 6,059 people registered to vote there.
The registrar’s office cannot keep track of students who register with an off-campus address, Sherayko said.
Citywide, Lynchburg had 48,522 registered voters as of Monday.
In late March, Liberty launched a campus-wide voter registration drive, in which professors handed out registration forms to students in all their classes over a two-day period. Though Liberty enrolls just less than 12,000 residential students, a surplus of 55,000 forms were on hand to ensure that any student who wanted to vote had the opportunity to register before the April 12 deadline, according to university officials.
Liberty’s get-out-the-vote campaign also extended to Lynchburg-based alumni, donors and online students. In March, Liberty mailed more than 10,000 letters written by LU co-founder Elmer Towns, urging members of the LU community to vote.
Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. did not have a reaction to the latest numbers.
“I just don’t have anything to say about it. The numbers are what they are,” he said Tuesday afternoon.
Liberty’s first concerted voter registration drive took place in the fall of 2008, when about 4,000 students registered to vote in Lynchburg for the presidential election. Last fall, approximately 3,200 Liberty students were eligible to vote in the state election.
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