Voter Registration Drive

I worked at a voter registration drive yesterday.

In the past 30 years, I’ve worked 100 voter registration drives if I’ve worked one. And that was AFTER the “lower the voting age to 18” petition drives. (You remember “old enough to die in Vietnam, old enough to vote”)

Anyway -- in all those drives, I never saw anything like what I saw yesterday.

For those of you out of state, PA is a closed primary. (Yes, I DO feel a petition drive coming on, but only in an off-year…) Therefore, to vote in the Democratic primary, one must be registered as a Democrat. Independents cannot vote in any primary unless there is an across-the-board election (as there was last year to fill the seat of a deceased state Senator) or a ballot issue.

Perhaps you’ve heard there is a bit of interest in the PA Democratic primary this year….

So, first -- the drive was held at a little strip mall. The woman running the drive put out signs at each entrance to the strip mall, plus signs at the table pointing out that it was a closed primary. Big, beautiful signs.

Then, there was the enthusiasm of the volunteers. REMARKABLE!

And then there were the people who stopped, read the signs, asked questions, and changed their party or registered as a new voter.

Often, we didn’t have enough chairs for the people who clamored to fill out forms. Cars would stop and people would yell their fervor. The excitement was palpable.

And we finished our day with more than 100 forms -- one drive, one day. Some were new registrations, but most were party-change.

The first thing that struck me was the number of people (one being in his 80’s) who have always (or almost always) voted Democratic, but registered Republican because “Chester is a Republican-controlled county”. We’ll see in May, when the County releases the April registration numbers. The last official numbers are from November 2007, when Chester County was 31.6% Democratic, 51.4% Republican, and 17% Independent/Other Party. If you look at actual vote tallies from recent years, it’s obvious that “registration” did not always equate to “number of votes”. While it’s true that for most positions, most Republicans won, the split is often damn close to 50/50, and Democrats have started winning more and more local and statewide races.

What I think will really wow people will be the 2008 turnout numbers. For frame-of-reference, in 2000 15.3% of registered voters turned out for the primary, and in 2004 21.7% turned out, county-wide. In the general on-year elections, we did 64.7% in 2000 and 71.9% in 2004. While from my personal perspective, these numbers are well below the 98% I think there SHOULD be -- but comparatively to national numbers, they are good. Therefore, based on primary percentage turnouts in other states, I think we could be looking at 60% turnout this year in the primary. And as I always tell you -- it’s the process -- the more people involved, the better. If the process corrupts, the results don’t matter. If the process corrupts, the results will yield a winner, but that winner is often illegitimate.

I ended my day by driving out to the far Western reaches of the County to pick up two change-party forms from 2 dear RINO friends. Welcome home!