Tracy Howard, Radford's registrar, is paying special attention to voter registration applications that cite a Radford University dorm room as a potential voter's address, but a student organization and the ACLU of Virginia say that's illegal.

Howard says he's following Virginia law the same way he has for 16 years.

"If they give me only a dorm address," he said, "they will be sent something called a pending denial. It says that you need to have a street address, permanent address, in order to register to vote."

Kent Willis, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said, "This can only be construed as an attempt to dissuade students from registering to vote in Radford or a ploy to trick them into providing contradictory information that could stall the registration process past the deadline."

Virginia registrars rarely have problems with students registering to vote, Willis said.

"When they care is when students are geared up to register in large numbers," he said. "Suddenly, that upsets the whole local power structure."

Across the country, new voters, particularly young voters, are registering in record numbers, most of them to cast ballots in the presidential race.

Howard says student registration drives are an issue. Groups conducting these drives "have at best simply misinformed on-campus individuals and at worst lied to them" about registration rules, he wrote in his response to the ACLU. They are also holding applications longer than they're supposed to and flooding Howard's office with them.

In a letter to Howard on Monday, Rebecca Glenberg, the ACLU's legal director, cited a string of court decisions that say students can't be treated differently from other people attempting to register to vote.

"Every individual citizen has the right to vote," Howard responded. "No individual has the right to register to vote in a community based upon convenience, false information or lies."

The RU Fair Voter Registration Alliance formed Sept. 15 after student Nikki Rampino registered using her dorm address and received a pending denial notice. After Rampino went to Howard's office and complained, her application was approved. She got her voter identification card Monday.

"I spend most of my time here, so I want to vote here," Rampino said. "I plan on staying in the area after I graduate. I'm working in the school system right now in Montgomery County as a student teacher."

Howard said those are the kinds of ties to the community that makes an address a domicile -- part of the definition of residence he says is required for voter registration.

In Virginia, voters can register only where they have both "a place of abode" and "domicile." A place of abode is simply where a person stays. Domicile means living in a particular locality with an intent to remain there for an unlimited time.

What that means is open to interpretation. In a Virginia Supreme Court case, a man who owned a house in Fairfax County, had his cars registered in Fairfax County and paid his property taxes in Fairfax County was stricken from the county's voter rolls because he had a series of one-year contracts to work in Washington County, where he rented a house.

Howard said people who own a home in Radford but winter in Florida could choose to register in Radford, because that's where their ties are. A person who owns a home in Radford but lives year-round in a nursing home in another locality could still register to vote in Radford, he said.

Yet, he also said, "The law doesn't state anywhere that 'domicile' is a matter of your convenience."

The Virginia State Board of Elections is no more consistent. At one point, its Web site quotes an attorney general's opinion: "A person's domicile is essentially a matter of subjective intent known only to that person." At another, it says, "The burden of proving domicile rests with the person asserting it."

"It's murky," said Susan Lee, the State Board of Elections' manager of election uniformity. "It's murky."

The one thing the students, Howard and the ACLU seem to agree on is that the murkiness needs to be legislated away.

Clarissa Clarke, founder of the Fair Voter Registration Alliance, said she is convinced Howard means to suppress the student vote in Radford. But she's willing to let the ACLU handle the immediate issue so she can work with Howard on the larger goal of getting the law fixed.

Clarke, who abandoned plans to protest at Howard's office today, said she wants to have a demonstration in Richmond after the election to encourage legislators to change the law. She wants Howard to join in the demonstration and the lobbying that will follow.

Howard said he's willing to work through local legislators, but "as far as carrying a picket sign, I don't know about that."