Liberty campaigns to register students
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| Liberty University, founded by The Rev. Jerry Falwell, has a massive voter drive underway. Students speculate that most of their votes will go to John McCain. (CATHERINE CARLOCK/ Rockbridge Report) |
Election Day promises to be a party at Liberty University. Freshman Tyler Martin can’t wait.
“Classes are going to be canceled, curfew’s going to be canceled,” he said, smiling. “Then we’ll get ‘open dorms.’”
“Open dorms” is the only time on Liberty’s campus when both sexes are allowed to mingle in dormitories or other residence halls. Liberty University, a private, religiously affiliated school with 10,500 resident undergraduate students, was founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The Lynchburg, Va. school is known to encourage students’ adherence to conservative values.
Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr, known affectionately as “Jerry Junior” to the students, has initiated a drive to register every student at Liberty University to vote. He has also promised to include local polling places on the standard campus bus routes.
Resident advisors handed out registration forms at required weekly hall meetings Sept. 16, in hopes of registering every student before Virginia’s Oct. 6 deadline.
Martin, an 18-year-old elementary education major from Harrisonburg, estimates that 95 percent of the freshmen on his residence hall will vote for Sen. John McCain.
Falwell said he hopes Liberty’s votes will sway the direction Virginia votes.
Recent elections in Virginia have been determined by small margins. Democrats Tim Kaine and James Webb were elected as governor and to the U.S. Senate by fewer than 10,000 votes. If Martin’s hall represents a sampling of Liberty University votes, and 95 percent of Liberty students choose to vote for McCain in November, Liberty could sway the vote.
And that seems to be the point.
Liberty’s resident advisors “ were telling us our university could determine the outcome of… who is elected to the presidency,” Martin said in response to an e-mail.
Universities in Rockbridge County are less active in encouraging their students to vote.
“As an educator, I want to see college students vote,” said Dawn Watkins, Washington and Lee University’s vice president for student affairs and dean of students. “I can see there being concerns about Liberty, because Liberty, as an institution, does have a particular political perspective that it tends to support.”
Watkins said that universities and other institutions are prevented from taking a position, but the federal government requires them to provide their students information about voting.
“As long as the administration of Liberty University is not taking a particular perspective…then they’re actually following what’s recommended by the federal government,” Watkins said.
If a student is already registered in his or her home state but is not at home on Election Day, he or she is eligible to vote by absentee ballot. The Virginia State Board of Elections offers absentee ballots on its Web site.
Applications for absentee ballots in Virginia are due to the State Board of Elections by Oct. 28.
But for some, registering to vote by absentee ballot doesn’t carry enough impact.
Dima Slavin, a Washington and Lee University senior who lives in Queens, N.Y., but is originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, was registered to vote in New York in 2005. But he said he felt that his vote didn’t mean much in New York. So he claimed residency in Virginia and registered to vote here.
“I spent so much more time here, since I had a job here and I was paying taxes here,” Slavin said. “I figured it would affect me more.”
Washington and Lee had generic voter registration forms available to all students at matriculation. But senior Rachelle Bernadel, who monitored the table on matriculation day, said that not many students picked forms up.
Most were already registered, she said.
Virginia Military Institute also has registration forms available for every student in several locations on campus, according to the VMI registrar’s office.
Since the beginning of the term, student organization leaders at Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista have staffed a table with voter registration information set up on campus. Burke Olsen, who works in the SVU communications department, said that the university’s president encouraged students to register.
There is no centralized system detailing every student who has registered to vote by absentee ballot, according to Valarie Jones, deputy secretary for the Virginia State Board of Elections. Jones said that students who attempt to vote in two states will be found and prosecuted.
“They run the risk of being court identified, and if they are identified,” said Jones, “it will be considered a felony.”
Jones likens voting twice to robbing a bank at gunpoint. There’s no way to stop the action before it occurs, but she hopes the fear of criminal prosecution will be a deterrent. Jones said that Virginia will have more than 10,000 attorneys, 5,000 for each major political party, keeping track of “anything and everything” that happens on Election Day.
Martin, the Liberty University freshman, said that he registered to vote before Falwell’s drive. He believes that history has shown how each vote matters.
“I feel like I’m going to make a difference,” he said.
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