Registration applications rolling in for city officials

By: Ray Reed | The News & Advance
Published: October 11, 2008

The voter-registration phenomenon keeps rolling this weekend in Lynchburg.

Although Monday was the deadline for registering to vote, Lynchburg officials were bracing for another delivery today of perhaps 1,000 more applications.

Actually, said Patricia Bower, Lynchburg registrar, “we have no idea how large” today’s shipment will be.

The surge of new voters for this presidential year already is four times greater than it was in 2004 for the George W. Bush-John Kerry contest.

A UPS truck was expected this morning to drop off a batch of Lynchburg-area envelopes that had been mailed last week to the State Board of Elections instead of the local registrar’s office.

That means Bower, her staff and a group of volunteers will enter more names into the database this afternoon “and again on Monday,” Bower said.

The state elections office in Richmond received about 100,000 applications in the mail over the weekend and on Monday as the deadline drew near, Bower said.

Workers in Richmond separated the envelopes into piles for distribution to about 135 local registrars’ offices this week.

“This has been an unprecedented year,” said Valarie Jones, deputy secretary of the State Board of Elections. “We have received over 300,000 applications since January, and people who worked here before say they have never seen anything like it.”

Lynchburg began this year with 39,787 registered voters. As of Friday morning, the number had risen about 7,100, or 18 percent.

Compared to 2004’s voter rolls, this year’s figure is up 21 percent and counting.

The rolls increased only 5 percent between the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

Of the 7,100 new voters already tabulated, about 4,200 are Liberty University students, officials at the school have said.

In a separate activity at the registrar’s office, about 1,500 absentee ballots already have come in, Bower said. They will be counted on Nov. 4, along with all the other ballots cast on Election Day.

Four years ago, a total of 1,600 people voted absentee in Lynchburg.