The Department of Political Science, the School of International and Public Affairs and the Collegiate Times hosted a forum Wednesday afternoon on the subject of student voter registration.
The panelists -- Republican State Delegate Dave Nutter, Barack Obama's Campaign for Change Virginia voter protection coordinator Scott Pluta, Montgomery County Registrar Randy Wertz and political science professor Craig Brians -- spoke on a wide variety of topics. The event was moderated by SPIA's director Gerry Kearns, whose questions appear in italics. The following is a partial transcript of their remarks. Pluta's remarks are omitted here because of space concerns.
What is the power of the single vote?
Craig Brians, professor of political science:
There is absolutely no reason for anyone to vote, and I seriously encourage you not to vote, to let the big boys take care of things. Mathematically, your vote doesn't count. It makes no difference whether you vote or not. People have an ideological motive for getting other people to vote.
I'm a political scientist, so normatively I don't care whether you vote or not. To me, if there are things that you want, collectively, then you might want to think about voting. You might want to think about organizing to vote. Over time, has individual voting ever mattered? We have 33,000 elected offices in the United States.
There are about three dozen times when an election was decided by one vote, although most of the famous ones you've heard about actually didn't happen or were decided by one vote in the legislature. You, as an individual citizen voting, your vote is not going to decide an election. It's extremely unlikely. But there still are reasons why people could vote like it makes you feel good, or you identify as being a voter. It's the only way you can identify as being a Steelers fan is wearing your Steelers' pajamas or something like that.
But, is there one thing you, students, want? Do you want stuff from other people? No, you don't. Why would you organize and vote? If you realized you did want some property benefit from some other group of society, you all probably would vote if you could all agree on what that was.
Could you say a little bit about the variation in the registration system between states?
We didn't have voter registration in general before the election of 1896, but now most places outside of North Dakota and some parts of rural Minnesota have some kind of voter registration process. In a small number of states, you can register to vote at the polling place on election day but in most places you have to register ahead of time whether its ten days or 30 days and it varies from place to place because voter registration now is governed by federal law, by state law, and by local ordinance as well. Even if you move across the street, and most of you will have to move farther when you graduate, you will have to re-register to vote in your new community.
This is unusual. In most other industrialized democracies around the world, voter registration is handled by the central national government. They also do a lot of other stuff too that you might not be comfortable with like ... they keep track of you in a centralized record system. But Americans seem afraid of stuff like that.
How could voter registration really be a barrier for someone these days? At one time, it was obvious ... but you all should stop by our department some time and ask (Charles) Taylor about when he first tried to register to vote in Williamsburg in the late 1960s. He was a faculty member at William and Mary and had a PhD from Yale and he couldn't pass the literacy test that they offered there.
Recently, my wife's sister came to stay with us, perhaps for an extended period of time. There was a discussion the other night around the dinner table about whether she should register to vote in Virginia or should she vote in California, where she lived until recently.
And so everybody turned to me and said, "What do you do to register to vote?" and I said, "You go to the Internet and you fill out this form and you turn it in and you register to vote," and my wife said, "It couldn't possibly be that simple" and then her sister said, "Yeah, I went to the library to get a library card and I needed two pieces of identification and a bill that says I've lived there more than 2 months" ... I mean, it's just voting, it's not like checking out books from the library. I still don't' think they believe me that that is what it takes but maybe Randy will have to swing by my house after dinner tonight to convince them.
E. Randall Wertz, Montgomery County Registrar
Could you describe how students register to vote?
All you have to do is get that form and fill it out. We don't treat students any differently than we treat anybody else in Montgomery County ... Back when I came aboard (as registrar), I knew that I had the issue (of registering students). I contacted registrars across the state and asked them, especially ones in places with large universities, how they handled their student population, and they said essentially we leave it up to the student to make up their mind as to what makes up their permanent address. I chose to follow that rule
Our office has let the student -- an adult, 18 years old -- to make that decision. Again, whenever an application comes in and I see a dorm address, we don't question it. We just go ahead and process it.
There was something in the paper about the Radford City registrar comparing a residence hall to a hotel in saying that instead of checking in for one night, students check in for four years.
In his locality, the university is considered a commercial property. You cannot register somebody at a commercial property. So that's what he is using as a determination. We chose not to go that route.
What brought up the storm and everything and has got me on CNN and everything else is a press release that we put out by Montgomery County that was based on the website of the State Board of Elections and what it said on the Web site, they've changed it since then, but it did say, "Are you claimed as a dependent on your parent's income tax returns? If you are, then your address is probably their address is probably your legal address." So that comes down from the State Board. It comes from the state definition of residence. That statute has a number of things that you have to consider when you determine residence.
I had no plans whatsoever of putting out a press release. I was going to let everything go its merry way. But then I was getting phone calls from parents and students saying they were misinformed by the people who were conducting the campaigns.
So I decided, being the registrar that I am, to give more information. And as you've heard the old saying, "no good deed goes unpunished," some people took exception to my wording (nodding towards Pluta) and we had some discussions about it and the initial wording was probably a little stronger than it should have been and so I changed it to what the state board Web site said exactly and that still wasn't quite right.
We as registrars are required to uphold the code of Virginia. The code says that you have to consider your financial independence, income sources, residence for income tax purposes, residence of parents, site of property owned, motor vehicle registration ... those things are in the code.
And so what we tried to do is tell the people "that is all you have to consider." I wasn't trying to tell people not to register or that these were issues that we were receiving calls on that this disinformation was being spread on campus.
It is a strange regulation that you should be asked to "consider" something. If people call you and ask for advice, and you say, "Well, you should consider X, Y and Z," then that's not advice. That is confusion.
It wasn't meant as confusion. The code is confusing. Unfortunately, the code leaves the responsibility for making those determinations on the registrars. You have different registrars interpreting that in a different way. ... I think what is most important for you to talk with your local delegate and to get (the state registration law) changed.
Delegate Dave Nutter:
Question from the audience: Delegate Nutter, has this issue of a lack of legislation clarifying the situation caught your attention? Are your colleagues discussing this?
I haven't gotten a single letter on it, let's put it that way. Voter registration tends to go up and down and it tends to follow four-year cycles ... But, no, I haven't had one communication from a constituent.
I don't represent Blacksburg proper but I do have the Corporate Research Center, the town of Radford and some of Floyd county, so from that perspective, as far as the clarification issue - like all these things, some of this gets used for tax purposes. That's part of the equation.
A few years ago, (a non-profit, voter registration group called) Virginia 21 was pushing the process of getting an absentee ballot online a few years back. I think it made perfect sense. But several of the registrars around my area were against it. So, these things move very slowly. I think the complication on the registration issue is about the tax issue. If you're a resident, this is where you get push back from the localities and the other association saying you need to be registering your car. Now, for those of you from Northern Virginia, our personal property tax is a lot lower here than there, so you might want to think about it.
Why should students register to vote?
Just so everybody knows, I was a student at Virginia Tech. Back in the 1970s, when Gerald Ford was running against Jimmy Carter. We always tried to get students to register to vote here. I've been a part of this process for 30 years.
I'm going to disagree with my colleague here (pointing to Brians) and say that your vote does count. In this region we've had some very close elections. The commonwealth attorney of Radford was elected by one vote. Even after the recount: one vote. State senator Madison Reeves, from this area, was elected by nine votes.
I also hope that voting is about being part of a community, too. Over the years here in this region, one of the dynamics we've also seen, from a town perspective, is that we've had, about every five years, a student run for (town) council.
That's always been an uphill battle, especially because council elections had been in May and in May you all are getting ready to finish up your work and get out the door. Now that council elections in Blacksburg have been moved to November, you're going to see more patterns of that.
Anyone who is in elected office knows they don't have an entitlement to the office. With people challenging us and running for office, well, that is part of what democracy is about and if you are in elected office it makes you a stronger official if you have a challenge.
So everybody has the right to have your voice heard. If you think about it from an education perspective, it helps you enter society, to be prepared, have an education, and be a working member of the community. When I talk to civic groups, I say that when we say "We the people," well, that's you, and I think the state registrar ... (is predicting) 80 percent voter turnout. That's incredible. That's a good sign.