Students win and keep the vote in Orange County, 1971–1980

The full story

Student voting had been questioned in Chapel Hill before: in 1928 local officials rebutted a charge that hundreds of students had voted illegally, and in 1967 some registrars told dormitory students to vote at home. In June 1971 a three-judge federal court ruled for a UNC law professor and his wife, kept from voting in the May town election because they had not lived in the state a year, and struck down North Carolina's one-year residency rule. That summer Citizens for Voter Registration organized to sign up the county's new 18- to 20-year-old voters, and on September 7 the Orange County Board of Elections ruled unanimously that students would be registered like anyone else, asked only their address, age and whether they considered Orange County home, despite the state elections board chairman's advice; about 16,000 UNC students lived in a county of 21,000 registered voters. In October the jury commissioners extended their deadline so that students registering that fall could be drawn for jury duty, and on November 2 the elections board refused a resident's blanket challenge of 120 dormitory students and lengthened registration hours in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, though it turned down registration on the campus. A rally with three rock bands at the Municipal Building on November 18 signed up about 250 voters, more than double the previous one-day high.

By January 1972 about 1,500 students had registered in Chapel Hill, and 337 students were on the county's new jury list, against fewer than 100 eligible in 1970-71. A Campaign for Young Voters canvass in February found only 13 percent of 2,781 students registered in Orange County. In March the county school board barred registrars from Orange High School, and the elections board twice refused a registrar on the UNC campus, the second time on April 4 over Student Body President Richard Epps's appeal, while the aldermen extended the campus bus route to the Municipal Building for the last registration days. On April 6, the last day to register for the May primary, at least 1,030 people registered at the Municipal Building, and the Campaign for Young Voters counted about 4,500 students among the county's 24,000 voters. In May UNC student Gerry Cohen was elected vice chairman of the county Democratic executive committee at a convention held under the party's new reform rules. A two-day registration in Woollen Gym that September signed up 826, and by October 9 the county had 32,337 voters, 3,052 of them aged 18 to 20.

In March 1973 the elections board proposed raising Chapel Hill's precincts from ten to fifteen by splitting the student-swollen Country Club, Estes Hills, East Franklin and Westwood precincts. In September it named student body vice president Juli Tenney registrar of the Country Club precinct, the first undergraduate named a registrar in the county, the Daily Tar Heel said, and she ran the precinct at Woollen Gym in the November election, in which Cohen, whom the paper called the first UNC student to serve on the board, was elected a Chapel Hill alderman.

In late 1975 conservative Democrats organized the Orange Committee, which, according to one of its members, meant to keep long-time residents' say in county government against what they saw as outsiders, students above all. Led by Hillsborough attorney Lucius Cheshire, it claimed about 200 members and raised almost $4,800 in 1976 for two commission candidates who lost the Democratic primary. In January 1976 the county elections board added a second weekly registration day at the Chapel Hill Municipal Building, but in September its chairman, Tom Holland, closed registration tables that precinct officials had set up at Granville Towers and the Stratford Arms Apartments, citing a board rule against special registration without its approval. In October the county commissioners turned down Commissioner Norman Walker's proposal to compare the voter rolls with tax listings, aimed at students who registered in the county but listed no property there.

In February 1977 Cheshire told the commissioners that the committee would ask the State Board of Elections to purge students who had not shown they meant to stay in the county. In March it filed petitions signed by 820 residents asking the state board to strike students from outside the county or order a new registration, to rerun the 1976 primary and general election for the commission seats won by Richard Whitted and Donald Willhoit, and to seek a special prosecutor; Whitted called it an attempt to seat the losers. The Northern Orange branch of the NAACP joined the opposition, and its president, Thomas Shanklin, said the committee opposed Whitted because he was Black and Willhoit because he was from Chapel Hill. On March 30 the state board found that the county board had followed state law in judging students' residency and declined to take up the petitions. That October Carrboro mayoral candidate Bob Drakeford asked the county board to look into reports that registrars at Carrboro Town Hall had asked students improper questions about permanent residence and their parents' tax deductions; chairman Joe Nassif said the board could hear only appeals from people denied registration.

In February 1978 the county board scheduled registration days on the campus, which Alderman Gerry Cohen said were its first there since the spring of 1976, and ten Orange Committee members sued the county and state elections boards, charging that 6,000 to 10,000 UNC students were illegally registered among the county's 34,402 voters. The Chapel Hill and Carrboro aldermen sent their town attorneys to help defend the registrations, Cohen arguing that the county drew about $650,000 a year in federal funds counted on students and about $2 million in property taxes because of them. In March 1978 Superior Court Judge James H. Pou Bailey ordered the county board to strike students who gave the University a home address outside the county and to presume that student applicants lived where their parents did. The county board appealed, the N.C. Court of Appeals stayed the order on March 22, and the state Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and kept the stay in place through the spring primary. Meanwhile 24 committee members had challenged more than 6,300 voters in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. The county commissioners had their attorney study suing the challengers, and U.S. Attorney Mickey Michaux asked the Justice Department to look into whether the challenges to Black, student and other voters broke the Voting Rights Act. Under a county board plan, challenged full-time undergraduates had to bring a witness and face a hearing at the polls. At the May 2 primary 1,160 of the 3,807 voters still under challenge came to vote, and precinct officials upheld six challenges. That summer the FBI looked into whether college students in Orange and seven other counties were held to stricter registration rules than other voters, and its report went to Washington with no action announced. Arthur Hurow, a member of the Orange Water and Sewer Authority, and his wife sued a northern Orange County farm couple, one of whom had challenged their registration, and a graduate student sued two Orange Committee supporters; with two countersuits, the five suits were dismissed by Judge Henry A. McKinnon Jr. in January 1979. In September 1978 the committee, its chairman saying its 200 members were too divided, decided not to campaign in the November election.

The state Supreme Court heard the appeal on September 15, 1978, and on February 5, 1979, in a unanimous opinion by Justice James G. Exum Jr., it vacated Bailey's order, holding that a student may vote in the college town if he has given up his prior home and means to stay there at least while a student. By that summer the last of the committee's challenges had been dismissed, and a new state law sponsored by Rep. Trish Hunt of Chapel Hill required a challenger to appear and prove a voter was improperly registered. In September 1979 the county board turned down requests for special registration at Carrboro apartment complexes, on the campus and at more community sites, chairperson Pat Carpenter and member Evelyn Lloyd saying the requests favored particular groups, and added evening and Saturday hours at the Carrboro Town Hall and the Chapel Hill Municipal Building instead. A week later it approved a registration session in Woollen Gym, the Country Club precinct's polling place, and named a UNC student a precinct judge able to register voters in Craige dormitory. On February 5, 1980, having refused such requests for the fall 1979 town elections, the county elections board agreed to special registration days in the Carolina Union for the May 6 primary, asked for by student government and both parties, and scheduled evening and weekend registration at the Chapel Hill Municipal Building, Carrboro Town Hall, the Chapel Hill Public Library and Carr Mill Mall. By then the graduate student who had been kept from voting in the 1978 spring primary had appealed the dismissal of his suit to the N.C. Supreme Court. On March 26 more than 200 people, most of them students, registered in the Union: 115 Democrats, 87 Republicans and 8 unaffiliated. Some waited 30 minutes, and registrars turned people away at the 4 p.m. close. On October 6, the last day to register for the November election, 1,061 people registered at Carrboro Town Hall and the Chapel Hill Municipal Building, more than on any other single day, according to Gerry Cohen of the county Democratic Party. He estimated that more than 5,000 had registered in the county since September, about 4,000 in Chapel Hill and 1,000 in Carrboro, and credited the Carrboro bus tax referendum, John Anderson's campus visit and longer registration hours.