New Voters Flooding Election Offices

[Clinton Crusader]

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1131&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040928%2F1714557054.htm&sc=1131

New Voters Flooding Election Offices

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.

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.

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