Cuyahoga Cty BOE hires staff to handle 20,000 new registrations

[Kolesar]

This is good news. Talk around here is that they would not be finished in time, which would be a disaster for us.

Excerpt:
Ohio is so crucial in this year's presidential campaign that voter registration groups are stepping over each other to locate every unregistered resident.

"Ohio's the subject of such a national focus that we're almost drowning each other," said Josh Gildrie, state coordinator for the New Voters Project. "It's absolutely amazing what's going on."

Election boards across the state have hired extra staff members, extended working hours, or both to process cards. Some boards are processing them 24 hours a day.

At Cuyahoga County's elections board, Ohio's largest, about 20,000 cards sat in bins last week, waiting to be checked and entered into computers. Director Michael Vu said the board will spend about $175,000 on extra workers to process the cards. He expected to eliminate the backlog over the weekend.

Mercury News

[skooooo]

1. This is a victory for democracy regardless how the race turns out.

[jimshoes]

2. Since I live in Cuyahoga County,

I am curious with so many unprocessed registrants, are there contingency plans in place for those who have just recently registered but do not find their names on the poll worker's sheet? I suspect this might happen a lot this year, or some first time voters going to the wrong polling places? Thanks in advance. I want to be able to give the best advice to any new or confused voters and to pass along this information to my City Council guys.
Just want to mention that I was at a Teamsters for Kerry rally this morning near where I live. The featured speakers were, Jimmy Hoffa, President of the Teamsters, Dennis Kucinich, Eric Fingerhut, Jerry Springer and several local dignitaries. Most talked about the importance of getting out the vote among other things. Dennis was very powerful as well and spoke about job losses in Ohio had the crowd cheering by the time he was finished. It was a very uplifting rally.
edit:sp

[shirlden]

3. Ohio is going to be Florida this year

Go here to read about it
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/953

Our Sec of State, Blackwell, is going to make sure we have problems. We managed to beat him on the Diebold machines for this election and I have a feeling he is pissed.
The answer to your question on voting at the wrong precinct is in this article and you aren't going to like it.






:argh:

[jimshoes]

4. Thanks for the link shirlden,

you're right. I'm not liking it one bit. Ohio looks like it is going to be the new Florida this year. See what happens when the "adults" are in charge. It's a digrace.

[Eurobabe]

5. so then Dennis needs to get vocal about this BLACKWELL

scandal, trying to shut out voters with less than 80# cardstock paper!