Registration complications prevent students from voting

Ryan Murphy
News Editor

While some VCU students took to the streets to celebrate President Barack Obama’s re-election, others were still struggling to make sense of issues that made it difficult for them to cast a ballot on Election Day.

Melissa Miller said she first registered in her hometown of Chesapeake after she graduated high school in June and when she arrived at VCU, she submitted paperwork to change her address to Johnson Hall. She said she received a confirmation email saying that Dominion Place on Grace Street was now her polling place. However, when she called the Board of Elections’ registration hotline, she was told she was registered in Chesapeake and that she would have to cast a provisional ballot.

“I’m disappointed in how this whole process went,” Miller said. “I also think it’s absurd that they said my vote would not count through the provisional ballot. I mean, I voted.”

Karishma Kainth also had to submit a provisional ballot, and was met with the same response from election officials — that there was a “zero percent chance” that the vote would count.

“It’s not really fair that I can’t vote. I did do the stuff that I was required to do as a citizen to vote, this isn’t my fault and I shouldn’t be penalized and not be able to have my … right to vote,” Kainth said.  

She tried to register through one of the third-party registration groups that had been working around VCU’s campus in the weeks leading up to the registration deadline on Oct. 15. She never received a voter ID card and began calling the election office a week before the election with no response. She finally had the chance to show election officials the receipt she received when she registered, but they told her the registration form never came in and that she’s not in the system, so the provisional ballot would not be accepted.

Kainth was frustrated with the Board of Elections and expressed concern because voter registration forms include personal information like Social Security numbers, and somewhere, hers was filled out and never turned in. She plans to contact the group that registered her directly.

MyHanh Lam said she had tried to change her registration to her Richmond address, but got a letter after the registration deadline that she had to resubmit her registration because the forms had been incomplete. Afterward, she received a voter registration card saying she was registered at her parents’ address — with her name spelled “Muttanh.”

Lam didn’t know where she could and couldn’t vote or whether she could vote at all since her name was misspelled on the card.

Across the state, local news outlets and social media continued to report long lines and lengthy waits at polling places well into Tuesday night. In Richmond, voters and volunteers said that issues with computer systems at the Main Library and Retreat Doctor’s Hospital polling places caused delays early in the day but that systems were up and running after a few hours.

The Virginia State Board of Elections did not return calls for comment on Wednesday and had not processed any formal complaints for publication on their website, where they were reporting official poll results.