For many students at Radford University in Southwest Virginia, the burning question isn’t who will win today’s election — it’s whether students formerly denied registration will have a say at the polls.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law have charged in a letter to Tracy Howard, general registrar of voters for the City of Radford, that he implemented “unlawful and potentially discriminatory policies” in administering students’ registration in the City of Radford and are asking Howard to make every effort to ensure all eligible student voters are able to cast ballots today.
Howard has come under fire for his decision to follow up with students who registered in Radford with their college addresses and ask that they clarify in writing what they considered to be their permanent address. Howard said students had been misinformed by voter groups and he wanted to ensure that students who had filled out voter registration forms to vote in Radford indeed considered their school addresses to be their permanent legal domiciles, as required by Virginia law to register to vote in the state.
“We simply asked them the question, where they considered their permanent home,” Howard said. “For the most part, the ones that got back to us told us that their permanent home is elsewhere. We helped them get registered in the most appropriate location for them.”
Howard, who confirmed receipt of the letter from the ACLU and the Brennan Center, said his office contacted as many students as possible by phone and sent out fewer than 200 postcards to students asking them to defend their domicile in an effort to combat the misinformation he said students received from third-party groups on campus. Only two students sent postcards back to his office indicating a decision to change their legal domicile to their school addresses, Howard said.
“We realized that those third-party groups were lying to these people, telling them that absentee ballots do not count, telling them they could register in Virginia even if they were residents in another state ... telling them that they could cast ballots in [this] state [and at home],” Howard said.
Howard was specifically concerned that students did not understand that by changing their legal domicile to their school addresses, they were abandoning their former addresses.
“We felt the need to contact folks to counteract that misinformation out there,” he said.
While Howard said he contacted students in an effort to fulfill his duties as registrar to aid the registration process and educate voters about proper registration, Jennifer Rosenberg, who co-signed the letter on behalf of the Brennan Center, argued that Howard had no right to target college students.
Rosenberg said she learned about Howard’s procedure when student groups contacted the center and told them about the confirmation cards students received in the mail.
Rosenberg said that by contacting Radford students when he saw a dormitory address on a registration form, Howard violated the Equal Protection Clause because he treated students as a separate class of voters and applied a presumption of ineligibility.
“You must hold students to the same neutral standard,” Rosenberg said. “The fact that he was following up with every single student [registered to vote in Radford] with one-on-one interviews, with questions misleading or confusing [students] creates an extra hurdle for them that not everyone has to jump through.”
Furthermore, the letter states that neither Howard’s concern that students did not understand the legal implications of changing their legal domicile nor his belief that students were misinformed and coerced by third-party groups to register constituted grounds for his efforts to contact students and ask that they clarify their addresses.
Howard should have accepted school addresses on voter registration forms without question, Rosenberg said.
In fact, in the letter, Rosenberg cites the Supreme Court’s decision in Symm v. United States as evidence that students can vote in their college communities regardless of their plans to live there permanently after graduation.
Howard said complying with the ACLU of Virginia’s and Brennan Center’s demands would allow students to vote twice, because many of them have already turned in absentee ballots.
Howard, though, “cannot presume that students are registering under false pretenses,” Rosenberg said. “He’s been able to offer no evidence of that, [and] even if he were able to offer evidence of that, that’s not a justification for not processing their registrations.”
Yet Howard maintained that he was simply following Title 24.2, Section 101 of Virginia law, which states that residency status for the purpose of voting “means and requires both domicile and a place of abode.”
Furthermore, the law states that when determining domicile, consideration may be given to other factors such as financial independence, residence for income tax purposes and residence of parents.
“It’s not that we’re trying to suppress anybody’s vote — we want them to vote — but it has to be correct under Virginia law,” Howard said. “That’s the problem I have — Virginia law is silent when it comes to telling me where an individual may vote other than the place of abode and domicile statute.”
Indeed, Virginia law is interpreted differently depending on the registrar. Charlottesville General Registrar Sheri Iachetta approached student registration differently, taking students at their word when they declared residency in Charlottesville in hopes of voting locally.
“Virginia is a voting-rights state — I can’t in good conscious separate someone in a special class,” Iachetta said, explaining that if a student living on 14th Street comes in to register to vote and another student comes to register who happens to live in Gwathmey dormitory, she would not challenge one voter and not the other.
Iachetta also said it is not her place as registrar to define domicile.
“Domicile is not my determination,” Iachetta said. “I am not qualified to determine domicile, so I have to take [students] at [their] word, at face value.”
Asked to clarify whether there is a firm standard by which registrars should confirm domicile, the Virginia State Board of Elections responded with a statement rebuffing rumors that individuals can register and vote in two different localities.
“An out-of-state student who attends school in Virginia may register to vote in Virginia, but cannot be registered elsewhere,” the statement notes.
Iachetta said standard procedure blocks voters from casting ballots twice, one of Howard’s concerns about counting ballots of students formerly denied registration in Radford.
“As soon as I get [registration information], I send this to states and say, ‘Get these people off their rolls,’” Iachetta explained. “There is a check and balance.”
Rosenberg agreed that Virginia law “invests a certain amount of discretion in registrars to look at a variety of factors” when registering voters who claim to meet the state’s residency requirements and said the Brennan Center has observed more incidents of unlawful registration practices in Virginia than in other states.
Rosenberg added that there will be a post-election advocacy push for the legislature to clarify this section of Virginia law.
In the face of challenges by the ACLU of Virginia and the Brennan Center, Howard said students whose registration applications in Radford were denied on the basis of address had the opportunity to appeal his decision. Provisional ballots will be available at the polls tomorrow, Howard said, for people who believe they should have been registered. Yet there is no guarantee that those votes will be counted, Howard pointed out.
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