Points Students Should Ponder Before Voting

The News & Advance
Published: September 20, 2008

The most serious duty of an American citizen is to vote, to take part in our participatory republican system of government. It’s through voting that citizens — individually and collectively — make their opinions heard in the nation’s halls of power, from Washington, D.C., to Richmond and county and city courthouses.

As a battleground state in the presidential election, Virginia and its 13 Electoral College votes are up for grabs, and Republicans and Democrats are waging fierce fights to gain the upper hand. Voter registration drives are under way across the commonwealth, and as The News & Advance has reported, local registrars are swamped with processing new voters’ applications.

Of particular interest to both Democrats and the GOP are college students. Young, idealistic and likely voting in their first presidential election, they’re ripe targets for both parties. And in a close election, they could easily tip the balance for one candidate or another.

There is absolutely nothing — and let’s repeat that for emphasis, nothing — wrong with registering young people and getting them involved in the political process. With overall voter participation rates at abysmal levels nationally, this nation needs any bit of help it can get.

Philosophically, though, we have problems with non-resident, out-of-state college students registering and voting in localities and states where they are not permanent, full-time residents.

College students have always presented local voter registrars with conundrums. State law is purposefully vague on where and how students should register and vote; efforts in past sessions of the General Assembly to clarify the code have fallen by the wayside with lawyers and politicians preferring legal ambiguity to concrete certainty.

Last month, the registrar of Montgomery County, the home of Virginia Tech, notified college students that registering to vote locally could raise questions as to their legal domicile, their deductibility on their parents’ federal tax returns, vehicle insurance and the like, signaling his office would closely scrutinize out-of-state students wanting to vote in Virginia.

Officials with the state Democratic party and with the Barack Obama for President state office, along with the Virginia chapter of the ACLU, immediately cried foul, perceiving the letter as a threat to their efforts to register young, presumably liberal college kids who would support their candidate.

On the opposite side of the political fence here in Lynchburg, Liberty University has actively encouraged its students to register to vote. As of last week, LU officials have forwarded more than 2,500 registration forms to local registrars: 1,700 applications from on-campus dorm residents, 300 from various campus events and 500 collected in class from commuter students.

And the effort is ongoing as the deadline to register and be eligible to vote Nov. 4 is Oct. 6.

Voting is serious business, whether it’s in a presidential election or a race for City Council.

There should be absolutely no bars to a first-year college student registering to do his civic duty, but that student (and those pressing him to register) should seriously consider where that ballot should be cast.

Should an 18-year-old student from, say, Des Moines, Iowa, or Baltimore, who’s just arrived for college in Blacksburg, Charlottesville or Lynchburg cast a ballot locally? If it’s a local election, does he really know enough about the area to make an informed decision?

Would it be ethical for a New Jersey student at Virginia Tech, upset over high out-of-state tuition and fees, to vote against a candidate in a state election who promised to keep in-state fees low at the expense of out-of-state students? Would it be proper for an LU student from Harrisonburg to cast a ballot in a Lynchburg City Council election in retaliation for a zoning decision that went against his school?

Those are the sorts of questions a transient, student voter should ask himself when deciding where to register.

There is nothing stopping that young Iowan or Marylander or that Harrisonburg LU student from registering back home and casting an absentee ballot.

That’s what the system of absentee voting was set up to handle.