Voter cards swamp counties

Jail inmates have also been registered.
STAFF/WIRE REPORTS
An avalanche of new voter registrations has prompted the boards of elections in Trumbull, Mahoning, Lawrence, Columbiana and Mercer counties to have their employees work extra hours.
Lines to register to vote were out the door Monday, the final day to register for the November election.
The total number of registered Trumbull County voters in November, however, is still unlikely to exceed the 2000 total of 145,000, director Norma Williams said.
About 139,000 residents are registered to vote in the upcoming election so far, and stacks of registration cards are still waiting to be processed, she said.
Several organizations, including labor unions and America Coming Together, dropped off bundles of cards in the past few days, said deputy director Rokey Suleman II. The Racial Fairness Project dropped off a bundle of 70 to 100 registration cards for inmates in the county jail, he said.
Misdemeanants and people being held pending trial will have to vote by absentee ballot, the board decided at a meeting Tuesday.
Board of elections staff has been starting work an hour early and leaving an hour late to process all the new registrations, Williams said. It is likely they will also have to work Saturday and Columbus Day (Monday) to finish the job.
Last week, staff members were offered their choice of overtime or comp time for working extra hours, Suleman said. They will be encouraged to use comp time this week because the board has little money left in its budget, he said.
At the meeting Tuesday, the board also decided to hire security for its offices on Election Day. The board discontinued the practice because of expense a few years ago, but Williams said it would be worthwhile this year.
Having off-duty law enforcement officers working "just keeps people calmer at the counter," she said.
Board of elections staff is also trying to procure cell phones for each of the 130 polling stations in the county. They were told to get the phones for use in emergencies by the Ohio Secretary of State's Office, Williams said.
County Administrator Tony Carson turned down the board's request to purchase them, she said. Meetings with cell phone companies are planned.
In Mahoning County
Election workers in Mahoning County also will be working extra hours to catch up, largely because of a heavy influx of voter registrations received Monday, said Thomas McCabe, deputy director.
McCabe didn't have figures for how many registrations were received during the entire registration period, but said at least 3,500 came into the election board office in the South Side Annex on Monday alone.
A box of about 2,000 was dropped off at the office about five minutes before the 9 p.m. deadline by a representative of Voting Is Power, a national group that is promoting voter registration. He said several of the registrations in that box were from June, July and August.
"I don't know why they waited until the last minute to hit us with those," McCabe said. "As of now, we're going to be staying late and working weekends because of what happened Monday."
He said temporary workers probably will have to be brought in to help the full-time staff process the registrations in time for the Oct. 15 deadline to certify them to the state.
McCabe said the influx of registered voters could cause another problem: lines at polling places on Election Day.
He said the county bought electronic voting machines two years ago when the county had about 172,000 registered voters. There was one machine per ever 200 voters. But with the total number of voters this year expected to top out at more than 200,000, McCabe said there might not be enough machines, and that could mean people standing in line to vote.
In Mercer County
Jim Bennington, Mercer County director of elections, estimated that between 300 and 400 people showed up at the courthouse Monday to register to vote.
"We had a line at the counter all day," he said, adding that his office has also received between 3,000 and 4,000 registrations by mail over the past couple of weeks.
He predicted the last-minute interest is likely to boost voter turnout beyond 80 percent in the Nov. 2 election. Mercer County usually gets about a 70 percent to 75 percent turnout for presidential races.
Bennington said his office staff will be working overtime to get all of the registrations processed. They all must be scanned into the state computerized registration system, and addresses, birth dates and signatures must all be checked as well, he said.
Bennington said he wasn't particularly surprised by the influx of registrations. Political parties as well as every special interest group have been out trying to get people to register to vote. Requests for absentee ballots have been coming in higher than normal as well, he said.
Oct. 26 is the last day to apply for an absentee ballot in Pennsylvania.
Columbiana, Lawrence counties
John Payne, director of the Columbiana County Board of Elections, said the board has received about 2,000 new registrations, which he said was not excessively large.
Payne estimated the registration cards are evenly divided between new registrations, changes of addresses and duplicate registrations.
He has had added a few part-time workers to answer the telephones, and the staff will work overtime to process the registrations.
In Lawrence County, the voter registration office got the names of 947 new voters Monday. About 300 came to the office, which had long lines throughout the day, and the rest were in the mail, said Marlene Gabriel, election board director.
Gabriel said employees will be working seven days a week to process everything.
"It's just enormous," Gabriel said. "We've been busy for presidential elections, but this has been more so. I think the cause is the voter registration drives that people are having."
Gabriel noted that the county has received new registered voters from drives in Pittsburgh as well as a local drive to register more Amish people.
The office also has to process 2,900 forms that came from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation this week where residents may have changed their addresses or names.