Voter Registration Soars!!!
Find a Conversation
| Tue, 09-28-2004 - 8:47am |
Flood of New Voters Signing Up
15 minutes ago
By ROBERT TANNER, AP National Writer
New voters are flooding local election offices with paperwork, registering in significantly higher numbers than four years ago as attention to the presidential election runs high and an array of activist groups recruit would-be voters who could prove critical come Nov. 2.
AP Photo
Cleveland has seen nearly twice as many new voters register so far as compared with 2000; Philadelphia is having its biggest boom in new voters in 20 years; and counties are bringing in temporary workers and employees from other agencies to help process all the new registration forms.
Nationwide figures aren't yet available, but anecdotal evidence shows an upswing in many places, often urban but some rural. Some wonder whether the new voters — some of whom sign up at the insistence of workers paid by get-out-the-vote organizations — will actually make it to the polls on Election Day, but few dispute the registration boom.
"We're swamped," said Bob Lee, who oversees voter registration in Philadelphia. "It seems like everybody and their little group is out there trying to register people."
Some examples, from interviews with state and county officials across the country:
_ New registered voters in Miami-Dade County, a crucial Florida county in 2000, grew by 65 percent through mid-September, compared with 2000.
_ New registered voters jumped nearly 150 percent in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) in Ohio, one of the most hard-fought states this year.
And that's with weeks left until registration deadlines fall, beginning in October.
Curtis Gans at the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate said a clear national picture won't emerge until more applications are processed next month. And Kay Maxwell of the League of Women Voters cautioned that some years that promise a boom in new voters turn out to be duds on Election Day. The danger is that new voters may not be as committed to showing up at the polls as longtime voters.
"Turning people out to vote is tougher than getting them to register," said Doug Lewis, who works with local election officials as head of The Election Center, a nonprofit group.
Rural areas, which trend conservative and Republican, aren't necessarily reporting the same growth as urban, more liberal and Democratic strongholds: Brazos County, Texas, hasn't beaten its 2000 numbers so far, though officials said applications are now rolling in. The state of Oklahoma, however, saw new registrations in July and August increase by 60 percent compared with four years ago.
Oklahoma officials said they had 16,000 new Republican registrations, 15,000 new Democrats and 3,500 new independents. In Oregon, where new registrations grew by 4 percent from January through Sept. 1, Democrats outregistered Republicans two-to-one.
Lewis and others say that no matter what the partisan breakdown, the registration boom is real — driven by a swarm of organizations such as Smack Down Your Vote (a professional wrestling-connected campaign), Hip-Hop Team Vote, traditional groups like the League of Women Voters; party-aligned groups such as America Coming Together, made up of deep-pocketed Democrats; and many, many more.
"There seem to be hundreds of them," Maxwell said.
The groups' focus is on states where the vote was close in 2000, but even in several states where the election isn't as competitive, officials say they are seeing new voters register in higher numbers. Officials in El Paso County, Texas, Maryland's Montgomery County, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and California's Los Angeles County said registration numbers are on pace to be higher than 2000.
In many jurisdictions, administrators complain that the crush of new registrations is overloading staff.
Clerks have hired extra workers in West Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. Philadelphia borrowed employees from other city agencies and started working overtime two months earlier than the usual post-Labor Day push.
In Greenbrier County, W.Va., deputy clerk Gail White said she's never seen so many people register in her 10 years working elections, and despite extra staff she's still behind on processing new and absentee voters. "I get them all typed up, and the next thing I know, here comes another pile," she said.
The reasons seem clear — groups on all sides were energized by the close election of 2000, which proved to doubters that a handful of votes can swing an election. In 2000, 9 percent of voters, roughly 9.5 million people, said that was their first time casting a ballot, according to AP exit polls.
"It's the high-growth areas, the suburban and exurban areas in those battleground states," said Scott Stanzel of the Bush-Cheney campaign. "There are opportunities there because there are so many new residents to register."
The GOP has launched a volunteer, precinct-by-precinct effort in swing states, with separate help from a Republican-aligned group, the Progress for America Voter Fund.
Democrats, who've consistently made turnout efforts the foundation of their campaigns, are devoting huge amounts of resources, too. America Coming Together focuses solely on registering and turning out voters.
The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law has boosted efforts, too. It cut off unlimited "soft" money to the parties, diverting some of that cash to community-based groups.
In Missouri, the result is that what used to be a mostly volunteer-driven voter-registration effort by the Missouri Citizen Education Fund has blossomed into a bigger, paid-staff operation, said executive director John Hickey. Funds jumped from a few thousand dollars a year to $250,000.
Focused on poor, black neighborhoods in St. Louis, mid-Missouri and rural areas, his staff went from registering a few thousand new voters in 2000 to at least 50,000 so far this year, Hickey said. In 2000, George W. Bush won the state by less than 80,000 votes.
___
On the Net:
Federal Elections Commission voting turnout site: http://www.fec.gov/elections.html

Pages
<<Supposedly, polls don't take into account newly registered>>
That's not accurate.
Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
Absentee Ballots Key to 2004 Election
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=1963&e=7&u=/ap/20040930/ap_on_el_pr/overseas_vote
By BETH DUFF-BROWN, Associated Press Writer
NEW DELHI - On election night in November 2000, dozens gathered at the American Center in New Delhi to watch the returns. When Democrats and Republicans alike saw the close results coming in, some were compelled to sheepishly admit that they hadn't bothered to vote.
They had thought their absentee ballots wouldn't really count, or were too difficult to prepare, or would be lost by the Indian post or U.S. diplomatic pouch.
Americans living in India, and dozens of countries worldwide, are determined that won't happen this time around.
"People know the absentee vote potentially turned the election the last time," said Carolyn Sauvage-Mar, an American living in the Indian capital who is pushing compatriots to vote. "This race is close enough that it hinges upon who's going to get out there and vote — and so much is at stake in this election."
In 2000, George W. Bush's election victory was certified only after the overseas ballots were counted. Though Al Gore (news - web sites) won popular vote nationally, Bush won the electoral vote after being certified the winner by 537 votes in Florida.
"The reality is that the expat vote actually decided the last election," said Sumana Brahman, coordinator of Americans Abroad in India. She and Sauvage-Mar, whose husband works for the U.N. Development Program, are helping Americans through the cumbersome process of getting their absentee ballots in order.
"Too many people are disengaged from the process," said Brahman, a 43-year-old public health consultant with two children at the American Embassy School.
Americans living overseas did not have the right to vote in U.S. presidential elections until 1975, so both women see themselves as new-age suffragettes, defending their franchise.
They're reminding Americans that while they may have missed the Sept. 15 deadline to request an absentee ballot by mail, they can still get it over the Internet and fax it to a Federal Assistance Voting Program center by early October, depending on their home state.
Some 7 million Americans live abroad. Those 18 and older are entitled to have their absentee votes counted in the state where they last lived — no matter how long ago that was.
Getting ballots into the hands of Americans overseas can be a problem; federal officials say they should be mailed out 45 days ahead of the Nov. 2 election. But the key battleground states of Washington and Oregon are already late or running into problems. Washington's ballots aren't expected to go to overseas voters until the week of Oct. 10. And Oregon, which mailed 10,000 overseas ballots by Sept. 18, must send out new ones because the Supreme Court ruled Ralph Nader (news - web sites)'s name could not be included.
In Florida, the state Division of Elections said absentee ballots had been mailed to all Florida overseas voters. Florida counties had a deadline of Sept. 18, except in some counties hard hit by the string of hurricanes, but ballots have been mailed to all voters by now.
Wisconsin sent blank ballots to overseas voters in August. But a second round of regular ballots normally sent out about a month before election day have yet to be printed. The state Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Monday on whether Nader should be included on the ballot; a lower court judge ruled that he should not.
Nevada's most populous county, Clark, started sending out absentee ballots to 3,250 overseas voters on Monday. In its second-most populous county, Washoe, some 1,000 overseas ballot requests aren't yet back from the printer, but officials hope to have them in the mail next week.
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, has distributed 3,000 voter registration applications this year, compared to 900 last time. In Italy, where some 169,000 Americans live, the U.S. consulate in Rome reports an overwhelming demand for registration forms. The Washington-based Democrats Abroad had 30 overseas chapters in 2000 and now has a presence in 73 countries, including an Iraq (news - web sites) chapter called "Donkeys in the Desert."
With its 492,000 overseas troops in mind, the Pentagon (news - web sites) improved its Web site for absentee voters and promised faster mail service as part of efforts to avert a repeat of the balloting problems four years ago. The Defense Department plan also included TV and radio announcements and banners in commissaries and classrooms.
But the program ran into trouble this month over complaints that anti-hacker measures were preventing legitimate voters from using a Web site that assists soldiers and other Americans living overseas. The Pentagon said it subsequently eased access to the site.
The Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion have made a huge difference in the attitude of Americans abroad about voting.
Democrats and Republicans feel they are bearing the brunt of a growing anti-Americanism not felt by those back home.
"This administration's foreign policy has been devastating to our image abroad," said Eileen Wilkinson of Democrats Abroad in Rome.
John Potter is a 60-year-old investment banker from San Francisco who has lived for 25 years in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy (news - web sites)'s 5th Fleet. A lifelong Republican, he says he's voting for Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites).
"I'm certainly not keen on President Bush (news - web sites)," said Potter. "Invading Iraq was a stupid thing to do."
Some say the outcome of the election matters greatly to citizens of other nations that bear the consequences of Washington's actions. One American has gone so far as to give his vote to Malaysians.
Eric Ossemig, a 38-year-old ex-Army soldier from Flagstaff, Ariz., is asking Malaysians to chose Bush or Kerry over the Internet, and says he'll cast his absentee ballot for whomever they choose.
"What may happen in some far-flung corner of the planet increasingly affects us all, like geopolitical tectonic plates," said Ossemig, a travel writer and photographer who has lived in Malaysia for 14 years. "I'm not voting my vote, I'm voting Malaysia's vote."
The site http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/30215s) says it has encountered "several attempts to manipulate the outcome" with multiple votes. It gives Kerry a strong lead.
Republicans also are determined to get out the vote overseas, placing campaign ads in the International Herald Tribune and Stars and Stripes.
Mark Simon, 40, from Falls Church, Va., is an advertising director for a Chinese-language newspaper and vice chairman of Republicans Abroad in Hong Kong. He acknowledged Democrats in Hong Kong were doing more volunteer registrations and were better organized than the local GOP.
"Defending George Bush (news - web sites) at dinner parties with a lot of expats around is not easy," Simon said. "The fierce opposition to Bush ... kind of blunts the whole rah-rah attitude."
Pages