On Oct. 9, Albrecht and Ned Hill, the business school dean, sent an e-mail to 50 Management Society members and 100 members of the school's National Advisory Council asking them to join them in supporting Romney's potential bid for the presidency. Hill and Albrecht signed the message with their official BYU titles, sent the e-mail from a BYU e-mail address, and began the message "Dear Marriott School Friend."

"We are writing to you as a friend to see if you have any interest in helping Governor Romney by volunteering to serve as a Community or Neighborhood Chair," Hill and Albrecht wrote in the e-mail, which was reviewed by the Globe. "Governor Romney's chances for success are significantly enhanced and energized by people, such as you, who are willing to help him at the grass-roots level throughout the United States."

Anyone interested in helping Romney was asked to send a note to Albrecht at his BYU e-mail address.

Federal restrictions

Both the church and BYU, as tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations, are prohibited by federal law from advocating on behalf of a particular candidate or political party.

The church's director of media relations, Michael R. Otterson, called "nonsense" the suggestion that church leaders were working to promote Romney.

"The Church goes to considerable lengths to emphasize to its members the institutional neutrality of the Church on partisan matters," Otterson wrote in an e-mail to the Globe Tuesday.

Otterson insisted Hinckley knew nothing about the effort by Romney's team to build a network of supporters.

Otterson said the Sept. 19 meeting that Holland hosted for Gardner, Stirling, and Josh Romney was merely "a handshake and a chat, literally a courtesy call."

Gardner, an acquaintance of Holland's, requested the meeting, Otterson said. "This was simply a response to an appointment requested by an old friend," he said.

But in an earlier interview Monday, Otterson said Holland held the meeting to "make sure that they were doing this properly and to inform them of the church's political neutrality." Holland expressed the view at the meeting, Otterson said, that the BYU Management Society would be a "perfectly reasonable" vehicle to help Romney.

BYU, though run by the church, is incorporated as a separate nonprofit entity. The BYU Management Society is officially part of the business school, according to Rixa Oman, the group's executive director. That means the society is subject to the same prohibition against advocacy for a particular candidate. (Some local chapters have registered separately as tax-exempt nonprofits and have the same restrictions.)