Liberty voter drive nets 2,500 registrations

By Christa Desrets

Published: September 17, 2008

In its first few days of encouraging students to register to vote locally, Liberty University has collected more than 2,500 voter registration forms.

“It’s going better than expected, and we’re going to continue to push it hard,” Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. said Wednesday.

Last week, Falwell announced an unprecedented voter registration initiative that included handing out registration forms by the thousands to students in classrooms and dorms.

Tuesday night, resident advisers distributed forms to the school’s more than 6,000 on-campus students at dorm hall meetings.

So far, 1,700 of those students have turned in paperwork to the school to vote locally, Falwell said. The school will forward the forms to the city registrar.

Also, the school collected about 300 registration forms at school events last week.

And Wednesday, the first day that professors handed out forms, they collected an additional 500 from commuter students.

That’s just including students who turn in forms to the school, Falwell said. Other students may choose to register on their own.

“I just told them how important it was to register here,” Falwell said Wednesday. “I heard on the radio yesterday that … Virginia is still right on the fence and could go either way. They could go down in history as the college that elected a president.”

Out of the school’s roughly 11,300 students, about 10,500 are U.S. citizens qualified to vote, Falwell said. A survey the school took last year found that about 65 percent of those students were registered to vote in their hometowns.

Liberty graduate student Justin Whitman, who previously was registered in his home state of New Hampshire, decided to register to vote locally last week, before Falwell’s announcement.

“It makes sense — I’m no longer under my parents’ wings, really,” he said. “In Virginia, it just seems that my voice would be heard a whole lot more.”

“Lynchburg is now going to be my home for the next several years, so why not be a voice in the community? And I think one of the biggest ways to do that is to change your voter registration to where you are going to be living.”

Whitman has heard other students around campus decide both ways, he said.

“Many people are talking about it,” he said.

“My brother is also a student here, and he’s decided that he’s not going to change (his voter registration). He said there were important things at home that he still wanted to focus on.”

Falwell acknowledged that not all students would decide to register locally, but said the school would continue the initiative through Oct. 6, the deadline to register to vote in the November election.

“You’re never going to get 100 percent, but we think we can register between 50 to 75 percent of these students,” Falwell said. “We’re just going to keep pushing until we run out of time.”