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While the Bush Justice Department can’t seem to weigh in to allow checking some 200,000 questionable Ohio registrations here, the chief of staff of Virginia governor Tim Kaine reportedly gives guidance to the State Board of Elections on loosening the voting verification procedures for college students.

We have written about the danger of repeat student voting in Virginia in posts here and here. We had asked why no Tidewater state legislator asked the Virginia Attorney General for an opinion on the State Board of Election’s direction here to the Norfolk general registrar to halt “the practice of sending a questionnaire to anyone applying to register from a college campus.”

Yesterday’s Hans Bader’s “Voter Fraud: An Epidemic of Repeat Voters” on the Open Market blog here leads us to the revelations unearthed by The Contemporary Conservative in their post “Is State Board of Elections Non-Partisan Any Longer? Part 2“  –

“It is clear that the Governor’s office was right in the middle of these discussions and part of the process that pressured local registrars to be less active in determining the legal residency of applicants for voter registration.”(Underscoring Forum’s.)

Contemporary Conservative’s post here also gives a most helpful chronicle of the events surrounding the student voting-registration controversy. Readers are encouraged to consider it all.

Open Market’s Bader reports –

“Thousands of out-of-state college students have illegally registered to vote in swing states like Virginia, even while registering, and applying for absentee ballots, in their home state as well.  Forty such names have already been forwarded to Virginia State Police. 

This process has been abetted by Virginia’s liberal governor, Tim Kaine, and his chief of staff, who did so in response to complaints by the Obama campaign, over protests by local voting officials across the political spectrum.

If there is any doubt about the stakes in Virginia student voting, readers should review Wednesday’s troubling DCExaminer story: “Barack Obama draws horde at James Madison” here.

“The Obama campaign is appealing relentlessly to Virginia’s 5 million voters to deliver the commonwealth for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1964. About 40 percent of the more than 400,000 new registrants this year are under the age of 25, according to the State Board of Elections.

College towns like Williamsburg and Charlottesville have traditionally been Democratic strongholds in Virginia. But despite being the home of JMU, Harrisonburg fell in with much of the Shenandoah Valley in 2004 to support President Bush’s re-election.

On Tuesday, JMU officials said Obama drew out a crowd of more than 8,000 in the school’s Convocation Center and a spillover group outside of about 12,000 watching on screens nearby. According to the school, there are 17,964 students who attend classes at the Harrisonburg campus.”

Of course, it is up to the two presidential tickets to make their cases to properly registered Virginia voters including those on college campuses, and to live with the results.  But legitimate Virgina voters including college students should not be defrauded at the ballot box through repeat-vote or non-citizen-vote or other schemes. Nor should the political campaigns of any party urge college students to cut legal corners in supporting their candidate. Doing so compounds the legal offense with a severe moral one of teaching young men and men to disregard the basic rules of self-government.

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