Here is another article on MSNBC verifying the flood of new registrations, and also showing it trending toward democrats. We need to do everything humanly possible to make sure these people show up on election day.
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.
Here's more specifics from the article:
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.
- Oklahoma saw new registrations in July and August increase by 60 percent compared with four years ago.
...
Rural areas, which trend conservative and Republican, aren't necessarily reporting the same growth as urban, more liberal and Democratic strongholds: Brazos County, Texas, hasn't beaten its 2000 numbers so far, though officials said applications are now rolling in.
Oklahoma officials said they had 16,000 new Republican registrations, 15,000 new Democrats and 3,500 new independents. In Oregon, where new registrations grew by 4 percent from January through Sept. 1, Democrats outregistered Republicans two-to-one.
...
The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law has boosted efforts, too. It cut off unlimited "soft" money to the parties, diverting some of that cash to community-based groups.
In Missouri, the result is that what used to be a mostly volunteer-driven voter-registration effort by the Missouri Citizen Education Fund has blossomed into a bigger, paid-staff operation, said executive director John Hickey. Funds jumped from a few thousand dollars a year to $250,000.
Focused on poor, black neighborhoods in St. Louis, mid-Missouri and rural areas, his staff went from registering a few thousand new voters in 2000 to at least 50,000 so far this year, Hickey said. In 2000, George W. Bush won the state by less than 80,000 votes.
The big problem for us is ensuring that these people actually get off their derrieres on election day. Everyone needs to do their part on November 2nd to push the turnout of democrats as high as humanly possible. I think we can break 65%, folks, but only if you bust your asses to make it happen.
Volunteer for phone banks in the days preceding the elections, and volunteer to drive people to the polls on election day. The best way to do that is to find your local democratic committee or a well organized local candidate in a high democratic area and do as much for them as you possibly can.
If you've worked on election day before, please post your experiences and suggestions in the comments. All these new registrations are useless if we don't have effective ways of turning them into votes.