Students get fuzzy details on voting

Registration raises controversies

The widespread practice of students' registering to vote at their college address has set off a fracas in Virginia, a battleground state in the presidential election.

Late last month, as a voter-registration drive by supporters of Sen. Barack Obama was signing up thousands of students at Virginia Tech, the local registrar of elections issued two news releases incorrectly suggesting a range of dire possibilities for students who registered to vote at their college.

The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax returns -- a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect -- and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents' car and health insurance. After some inquiries from students and parents, and more pointed questions from civil rights lawyers, the state Board of Elections said Friday that it was "modifying and clarifying" the state guidelines on which the county registrar had based his releases.

Student-registration controversies have been a recurring problem since 1971, when the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 from 21, and despite a 1979 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that students have the right to register at their college address.

Virginia is not the only state with murky guidelines. South Carolina's voter-registration site, for example, says students who want to register to vote at their college address must demonstrate "a present intention to remain in the community."

"There's no issue for snowbirds who live in Iowa but fly to Florida for the winter," said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group's New Voters Project. "One demographic group, like students, shouldn't have to overcome a special hurdle to vote. We impose all the responsibilities of citizenship on students, and we have to provide them with the privileges of citizenship, too."

Jahagirdar said Virginia's warnings were profoundly misleading. "We have been registering young voters for 25 years," she said. "We registered 500,000 young voters in 2004, the majority on college campuses, and we've never heard of a single one who lost health insurance, scholarship or tax status because of where they registered to vote."

In Virginia, the county registrar first issued an alarming release Aug. 25, and two days later a slightly toned-down version using language taken from the state Board of Elections' Web site.

That site says students can determine their legal residence but advises them to consider certain questions. "Are you claimed as a dependent on your parents' income tax return?" the site asks. "If you are, then their address is probably your legal residence."

The site also tells students to check whether their coverage under their parents' health or automobile insurance, or their scholarship, will be affected by changing their residence.

Civil rights lawyers say these guidelines are problematic and could infringe on students' voting rights.

"What the state Board of Elections has on its Web site, to me, sounds like it is discouraging students from registering at their school address," said Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Indeed, the Montgomery County registrar, E. Randall Wertz, said several students had canceled their local registration over their worry about the possible consequences. Wertz said he had issued the release to try to dispel confusion and explain what he believed to be the consequences of choosing a college address as a primary residence.