High voter turnout expected Tuesday
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| Local elections officials expect up to 90 percent of registered voters to show up at the polls. (REBECCA BRATU / The Rockbridge Report) |
Registration in the Rockbridge area has broken records this year, raising expectations that turnout on Tuesday may be at least 5 percentage points higher than in 2004.
Rockbridge County Voter Registrar Marilyn Earhart predicts a turnout in the county as high as 90 percent. Rockbridge County, Buena Vista and Lexington all registered more voters than they did in the 2004 election, which held the previous record for voter turnout.
That has elections officials on high alert.
“We’re working, obviously, much longer than [scheduled] hours to make sure … that we have the preparations made to handle what we think will be one of the biggest turnouts in history at the polls,” Lexington Voter Registrar Carolyn Rendleman said.
Rendleman has been city registrar for 10 years. She says she expects up to 80 percent of registered voters to show up at the polls Tuesday, after a turnout close to 70 percent in 2004. Rendleman credits the increase to people’s enthusiasm over the close race in Virginia.
“This is a swing state; they are excited about seeing how Virginia goes,” she said.
In Buena Vista, Voter Registrar Arlene Garrett registered about 3,800 people, at least 200 more than in 2004. She hopes 75 percent of those voters will cast ballots on Tuesday.
Both cities are reflecting a registration trend that’s been sweeping the state.
Four years ago,71 percent of Virginia's registered voters cast ballots in the presidential election. A record 3.2 million voted. But about 4.5 million people were registered in 2004. This year, the voter rolls top 5 million. If the same percentage votes this year, about 300,000 more people will cast ballots in Virginia.
Earhart registered 1,000 more voters in the county this year than in 2004. She is not concerned with registration fraud, because she relies on a statewide database that doesn’t allow Virginia residents to register more than once. If a voter moves within the state, his records move with him.
But registrars fear that large numbers may increase the risk for irregularities on Election Day.
“Lines might be long,” Garrett said.
Peak voting times are from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., when people are going to work; between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., when they have their lunch breaks; and from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., when they are going home. Polls close at 7.
Buena Vista has hired two more people this election year to assist with the expected increase in voters. To avoid voter frustration, the state board has urged those who can cast absentee ballots -- by meeting one of 17 criteria -- to do so. In 2004, a total of 222,000 absentee ballots were cast in Virginia. More are anticipated this year, said voter registrars.
“I expect we’ll set a record,” Rendleman said. “We’ve had the highest number of requests [for absentee ballots] this year than ever before.”
In Virginia, people may vote absentee in person or by mail. But while that method may reduce Election Day traffic, it won’t eliminate problems. Rendleman says that people who vote absentee by mail are the most likely to make a mistake on their ballot, such as forgetting to sign or not providing an address.
If a mistake is made on the secret voting card inside the envelope, voters won’t be able to fix it, because registrars cannot check ballots before Nov. 4. Absentee ballots are kept unopened in a safe until they are counted on Election Day. That counting cannot begin until after 7 p.m.
But Earhart doesn’t think results in Rockbridge will remain unknown for long.
“We’ll know before we go home that night,” she said. “Probably by 10 o’clock we should be ready to go.”
Rendleman also says she expects the results in Lexington to be revealed quickly on Election Night.
“I don’t think there’ll be a question about Lexington’s results,” she said. “I think it will be clear who has won.”
Despite extensive media coverage of registration and voter fraud in swing states such as Florida and Ohio, the issue doesn’t seem to concern local registrars. Earhart says that the statewide database works well for detecting duplicate registrations. As for the voting process, registrars trust their equipment.
“I am very confident about the machines,” Rendleman said.
She says the machines are kept locked and all the activity performed on them is automatically recorded. Access to the voting systems is reserved for employees of the registrar’s office.
Earhart says that the county registrar’s office has been running tests to make sure the machines are working well.
“We did have some [machines] that were off a little bit and we went in and changed it so that everything winds up good,” she said.
Polling places in Lexington, Buena Vista, and Rockbridge County use Patriot DRE machines, which use a paperless touch screen. There is no backup paper-vote system. According to the nonpartisan organization VotersUnite!, documented failures of Patriot systems include loss of votes, under- and over-counting, and other malfunctions that caused delays at polling places.
But Rendleman remains confident.
“I think we have one of the best systems to catch voter problems, and the machine problems are just negligible,” she said.
Lexington Registrar Carolyn Rendleman talks about election preparations
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