PENNSYLVANIA Voter registration deadline sees crunch

Election bureaus were busy at the voter registration deadline.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- Don Selvey hasn't voted for about 30 years, always too consumed with personal issues or moving to another town. Bob Sowers has never voted -- he figured his vote wouldn't make a difference.
But this year Selvey, 54, of Harrisburg, and Sowers, 44, of Hummelstown, both found issues in the presidential election that inflamed them enough to register Monday, the last possible day to do so in Pennsylvania before the Nov. 2 election.
They joined hundreds of thousands of people in Pennsylvania to register since the April primary, the largest such flood that many elections officials could remember seeing in perhaps a decade or more.
In an effort to capture Pennsylvania, one of the biggest swing states in the presidential election, the Democratic and Republican parties have poured resources into registering voters for their side. Many advocacy groups also conducted voter registration drives for the first time, dropping off box after box of registration forms at election bureaus.
Scrambling
In county election offices statewide, workers were scrambling Monday in the hours before the registration deadline passed, a crescendo that arrived after weeks or even months of working to keep up with the crush of applications.
Some counties have brought in data programmers from other county departments to spend nights and weekends entering application data into computer databases, and elections officials expect the breakneck pace to continue beyond the election.
Compounding the work are applications in which voters are simply changing parties, as well as duplicate and incomplete applications among those submitted by advocacy groups.
In Philadelphia, data programmers have been working seven days a week for the last three months to handle the largest flood of applications since the hotly contested 1983 mayoral primary between W. Wilson Goode and Frank L. Rizzo.
With the new applications, the number of registered Philadelphia voters swelled by 70,000 from 965,394 at the April primary -- with tens of thousands more expected Monday, Lee said. But county election officials from Philadelphia to tiny Forest County said they expected the information would be programmed in time to be printed in the poll books at voting stations.
Across the state, in Allegheny County, 84,033 new voters had registered in addition to the 860,561 already registered in April, with more expected, said Mary Lou Filsinger, a senior administrative assistant.
In Montgomery County, the state's third-largest county and its largest Republican-leaning county, 32,000 new voters have registered, with possibly another 10,000 to 15,000 applications not yet entered into a database.
"Every single person in my office has been on the phone all day," said Joseph R. Passarella, the county's director of voter services. "It's very difficult to get anything done."
The telephones were also ringing for another reason: Many voters who have applied for an absentee ballot want to know where it is, Passarella said.