Tuesday, October 19, 2004
New-voter signups soaring
Southwest Ohio adds 153,000 registrations
By Cindi Andrews
Enquirer staff writer
Twice as many Hamilton County residents signed up to vote this year as in 2000, the Board of Elections reported Monday, bringing to 91 percent the proportion of voting-age adults registered.
More than 84,000 new voters have joined the Hamilton County rolls since January, board director John Williams said.
That compares with 41,028 new voters in 2000 and 47,894 new voters in 1996.
Election officials across Ohio and other battleground states in the presidential election say they also are counting record numbers of new voters.
Southwest Ohio's share of new voters comes to more than 153,000, including 33,128 in Butler County, 20,165 and counting in Warren County and 15,667 in Clermont just since the March primary.
"It's good news for the democracy, it's good that people participate," said Al Tuchfarber, political science professor at the University of Cincinnati.
"One of the reasons a lot of people didn't vote in the past was because they didn't think it would make a difference. Politics is now more salient to people than it's been in the past."
The total number of registered voters in Hamilton County is actually slightly lower than in 2000 - 573,078 today versus 585,985 then.
But that's likely due to recent removals of inactive voters from the rolls, Tuchfarber said. Also, the county's population declined by about 22,000 since 2000, according to Census Bureau estimates.
Complete new-voter registration information was not available from Northern Kentucky counties Monday, except in Campbell, which reported 3,757 new registrations since May.
Analysts and election officials credit high voter interest to the tight race between President Bush and U.S. Sen. John Kerry, and Americans' collective memory of just how close the 2000 race was.
"People do believe that every vote counts," Williams said.
Current events play a role, too, according to Robert Mosketti, director of the Butler County Board of Elections.
"We're in the midst of a war, and I think people are concerned with their safety and they know they're going to have to make the right decision," Mosketti said.
The high numbers of new voters could further complicate elections in a year when every aspect of the process is being challenged.
"The fact that you have a lot of people who have never voted before will lead to more confusion on Election Day," Tuchfarber said.
New voters in Hamilton, Butler and Warren counties must figure out that bane of Florida voters: punch-card ballots. Punch-cards have not been as big an issue here, but voters must be careful not to invalidate their votes by picking too many candidates in a given race.
Some registrations taken outside voters' home counties are still trickling into the proper locations. Hamilton County elections officials also continue to investigate dozens of registration forms they suspect to be fraudulent, including at least 19 collected through ACORN, a group that represents low-income families.
It's hard to know how many new voters are Democrats and how many Republicans because party affiliation in Ohio is determined by which primary ballot a voter picks.
The state will end up with about 7.9 million voters, an increase from 7.1 on Jan. 1, according to Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.
Absentee glitch drops Kerry's name
The Hamilton County Board of Elections sent out two absentee ballots that mistakenly left John Kerry's name off of the list of presidential candidates, director John Williams said Monday.
The mistake was discovered when one voter called to say Kerry was not on her absentee ballot, he said.
Elections officials determined that a computer glitch left his name off two ballots. Williams tracked down the other erroneous ballot late Monday.
It's the second ballot error discovered. The board re-sent the first 17,500 absentee ballots it mailed after discovering an error on 3,400 of them that would have credited votes for an uncontested county officeholder to a Democratic candidate for Ohio Supreme Court.
