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Voter registration burgeoning

2,600 residents of Mercer sign up in a week’s time

By Matt Chiappardi, Staff Writer
    In Hightstown, East Windsor and the rest of Mercer County, excitement over an historic presidential race seems to have translated into a huge increase in residents registering to vote.
    “Every four years it’s busy, but this year is even more so probably because of the excitement of an African-American on the Democratic side and a female on the Republican side,” said Bettye Monroe, the county’s superintendent of elections.
    As time marches to the Oct. 14 registration deadline, East Windsor stood at 14,654 registrants Tuesday, with an increase of nearly 250 in just a week, according to the superintendent. In Hightstown, the number of registrations was 2,823, with a nearly 100-person bump from a week earlier, she added.
    And Ms. Monroe said she expects registrations to accelerate in the days to come.
    In contrast, the 2004 presidential election year saw 14,016 registrants in East Windsor and 2,778 in Hightstown by the deadline, she said.
    Countywide, the registration tally stood at 212,227 Tuesday with an increase of nearly 2,600 registrants over the week, she said. In 2004 that total was only 208,031 by the deadline, she added.
    The influx of registrations has so overwhelmed county election officials, they’ve had to shuffle staff from other departments just to keep up, Ms. Monroe said.
    Workers processing registrations are now working Fridays and Saturdays, days off during national elections past, and have extended their Monday through Thursday workday to 8 p.m., she explained.
    Even interest in absentee ballots has risen, according to County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello.
    So far, the county has received about 6,000 requests for absentee ballots, a “huge spike,” she said Tuesday. Moreover, Ms. Sollami Covello said she expects the number of absentee ballots to double by the Oct. 28 deadline.
    Some of that increase can be attributed to a 2005 change in state law that allows absentee ballots to be cast for any reason, not just illness or travel, she said.
    As with the elections office, the clerk’s office is drawing staff members who normally work on other projects to deal with the influx, Ms. Sollami Covello said.
    From no matter what perspective one looks, the 2008 presidential election promises to be monumental.
    Not only will it result in either the nation’s first black president or its first female vice-president, it’s also the first election since the 1952 race between Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and then-Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson not to feature a sitting president or vice-president on either party’s ticket.
    Moreover, the 2008 election is the first one in history pitting two sitting senators against each other, and will most likely result in the first person moving directly from the Senate to the White House since President John F. Kennedy did so in 1961.