Student political engagement a force to be reckoned across Virginia

In Radford, student clamor for local voting rights during the 2008 presidential election helped spark a change in state law affirming a college student’s right to register to vote from their dormitory address. In 2009, the city registrar expected an uptick in student registrations from Radford University, but it just didn’t happen.

“My sense of it is that after the presidential election went away in 2008 that all interest on campus was lost…” said Radford general registrar Tracy Howard. “It’s like we used reverse psychology. We said ‘OK, we got this fixed; you guys can register’ and they’ve been deathly quiet every since.”

Voter registration efforts at the University of Virginia, however, have been consistently strong, whether or not it’s a presidential election year, according to Charlottesville general registrar Sheri Iachetta. For example, the Venable precinct, which is primarily student housing, surpassed 5,000 registered voters during the fall 2009 election, and numbers in other student-heavy precincts are also increasing.

“We always do a huge voter registration drive at the bookstore before classes start,” said Iachetta, who estimates that they register hundreds of new students each year.

A look at voting patterns on several Virginia campuses shows that while Liberty University’s aggressive get-out-the-vote campaign for the City Council elections next month has stirred controversy in the Hill City, political engagement by college students can be a force — albeit an unpredictable one — in other communities, too.

It can be difficult, though, to gauge student interest in local races in cities such as Charlottesville and Harrisonburg, where local elections take place in the fall and are often dwarfed by state and federal races.

Not so in Lynchburg, where City Council elections will be held May 4. The city registrar’s office says there are more than 4,250 voters with a Liberty campus address registered to vote for that election, where eight people are running for three at-large seats.

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. That effort resulted in several hundred new on-campus voters.

Professors also used class time to show PowerPoint slideshows and videos set to songs like The Beatles’ “Revolution” that encouraged student voting and highlighted issues that are important to the university.

Compared to Liberty, administrators at Radford University take a hands-off approach to student voting. Trae Cotton, Radford’s dean of students, said the administration encourages civic engagement but does not have a concerted push to get students to vote.

“I think what separates a Radford or UVa from a Liberty, is we are public institutions that have to remain as an institution non-biased and subsequently bi-partisan, where I think Liberty has taken a stance that has been very much toward one particular party,” Cotton said.

Cotton said that while there was little student interest in the past governor’s race, tensions ran high in the fall of 2008 when the Radford registrar refused to allow students to register at their dormitory addresses.

“With the last presidential election, we had a fairly big uproar around here,” Cotton said.

While Radford students were being turned away from the polls, voter registration at James Madison University surged prior to the 2008 presidential election, with about 6,000 new voters in Harrisonburg, the majority of them college students, said general registrar Debbie Logan.

JMU voter registration efforts are primarily student-driven, said Don Egle, director of public affairs and university spokesman.

“JMU does not tell students that they have to vote and they don’t tell students who to vote for,” he said.

Logan said it’s difficult to keep track of just how many JMU students are eligible to vote in Harrisonburg since so many live off campus. She estimates that 1,500–1,700 people are registered with an on-campus address, which would account for mostly freshman.

Student interest tapered off by the fall 2009 state and local elections, Logan said, noting her office only registered about 75 new voter registration forms during its fall voting drive at JMU.

“Unfortunately I can say that most of the students just vote in the presidential elections and really don’t care about the city elections,” she said, adding, “We are here to facilitate their voting. We want them to vote. We don’t care where they vote… whatever they consider their home is where they vote.”

In Charlottesville, voter registration efforts at UVa have been strong during the past 11 years that Iachetta has been general registrar.

Students voting in state and local elections, even if their hometown is out-of-state, have not sparked significant controversy in the Charlottesville area over the past decade, Iachetta said. In fact, Charlottesville made it easier for students to vote in local elections in 2007 by moving them to November from May, when student voters were typically taking exams or preparing to leave campus.

“We thought they (students) would take more ownership in the area if they were able to vote,” Iachetta said.

However, city council members said that student interest in local elections is typically low.

“We have historically very low student participation in local elections here,” said Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, who was re-elected in November. “Every time we have a city council election, candidates try to motivate student voters and it’s been a hard nut to crack.”

City council member Kristin Szakos, who was elected in the fall, said that while UVa students volunteered with her campaign, the student body as a whole was not energized for the election the way they were during the Obama race.

“In 2008, the students at UVa crowded the polling places and it was pretty exciting,” Szakos said. “It wasn’t that they didn’t vote (in the City Council election), but they didn’t turn out it big numbers.”

Adam Gillwater, a UVa junior and president of the University Democrats club, said that UVa promotes civic engagement, but does not go so far as to cancel class on Election Day like Liberty does. During the past two elections, the university facilitated voting by using the campus bus system to take students to the polls, and allowing student political groups to set up posts around campus reminding students to vote.

“I don’t get that sense of animosity around here,” Gillwater said of the community reaction to UVa’s student voting initiatives. “Partially that might be due to the fact that Charlottesville is a pretty liberal town and they want more students to register because they think they’re more likely to vote with the rest of the town,” he said. “Even if we’re only here for four years, we do have a stake in the community and a responsibility to vote.”

Locally, students at Lynchburg College launched a campus-wide voter registration drive before last Monday’s registration deadline, said Angela Massino, a junior from Delaware who produced a video urging student to vote.

“It kinda spawned from (Liberty’s) extreme push, but at the same time ours is coming from the students up … a grassroots student movement … rather than from the faculty down.”

Massino said registration efforts were aimed at encouraging voting in general, be it in Lynchburg or a student’s hometown.

“We wanted to be represented as well, to get our voices out,” Massino said. “We feel this was just as important as Liberty University students getting their voices out.”

“It’s their own conscience, I think, whether or not they are really a part of this community or whether they’re just coming here for school and then going back home,” she added.

Lynchburg College senior Amanda D’Arcy, who is from New Jersey, spearheaded efforts to organize a cohesive voter registration effort, which included e-mail blasts to students reminding them to register.

“Basically we just wanted to encourage them to be civically engaged and be aware of what’s going on in their community, and drive home the message that local elections are just as important as presidential elections are,” said D’Arcy.

“I think that this year is just a really crucial City Council election so that’s why we’re maybe being a little bit more proactive about it.”

Virginia campus politics

• In Charlottesville, the number of registered voters surpassed 5,000 in a precinct made up primarily of student housing for the University of Virginia before the November 2009 elections.
• In Harrisonburg, home to James Madison Univer-sity, student-fueled voter registration increased by more than 6,000 before the 2008 presidential election. A registrar-sponsored voter drive at JMU before the November 2009 election netted about 75 new registrations.
• In Radford, tensions ran high when the registrar refused to register Radford University students at their dormitory addresses during to the 2008 presidential election. After a change in state law made it easier for college students to vote in 2009, turnout was low for the November gubernatorial elections.
• In response to Liberty University’s get-out-the-vote campaign, Lynchburg College launched a student-driven voter registration drive before the registration deadline.