Thousands of Liberty students registered

Christa Desrets and Ray Reed
Published: October 8, 2008

Liberty University submitted more than 4,200 completed voter registration forms to the Lynchburg City Registrar on Monday, the deadline to register to vote in November’s election.

“We were pleased with the final tally,” Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. said Wednesday. Including an estimated 2,000 students who already were registered to vote locally, “that puts us in that 50- to 75-percent range that I was hoping for (out of Liberty’s potentially eligible 10,500 students).”

Last month, Falwell made an unprecedented call for students to vote locally, and announced that the school would cancel most classes on Election Day and provide bus transportation to the polls.

Larry Provost, director of commuter affairs, said that about two-thirds of the applications came from students living in dormitories who would vote at the Heritage Elementary School precinct. The remaining applications were from students who live off campus.

Before the Liberty surge, the Heritage Elementary precinct had about 1,900 registered voters, said Lynchburg voter Registrar Patricia Bower.

As of Wednesday morning, the Heritage number stood at 4,663, and counting.

“I think we can say at least 95 percent of that is Liberty-related,” Bower said.

Bower described the pile of Liberty applications as “several inches” high and said it probably would take the rest of the week to enter them in the computer system.

“That’s probably close,” Bower said of Liberty’s count of 4,200 applications.

“I don’t know how many we still have” to process, she said.

Several applications came in Monday afternoon just before the deadline for registering, and other applications came in Tuesday’s mail with postmarks from the day before, she said.

Bower said there was no way to separate the off-campus student applications from the ones generated by other voter-registration drives in Lynchburg.

Bower said those signups, conducted by door-to-door canvassers and at public gatherings, helped shorten the last-minute registration line at her office Monday. “It wasn’t long and out the door like we had in 2004” for the presidential election, she said.

Bower said that four to five volunteers plus three staff members were working with the applications.

One of those staffers was handling the task of calling and coordinating volunteers, some of whom were Liberty students, Bower said.

The majority of Liberty’s applicants were first-time voters, Provost said.

Liberty gained national media attention after Falwell’s announcement last month that it would distribute voter registration forms by the thousands in dorms and classrooms.

“That was amazing,” he said. “We had a TV crew from France, one from Norway in convocation Monday; we did an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Monday.”

He said the school plans to continue to push students to vote locally in future elections.

“If there are other colleges that have been doing this, they just haven’t gotten the attention,” he said. “It probably will catch on in the future.”