Record-breaking voter registration and voter turnout expected

Because of all the excitement and interest surrounding this year’s presidential primaries, voter registration figures are way up. Numbers are up for women, young people, and nearly every ethnic group. They’re up in rural and urban areas, in the North and in the South.

Record-breaking turnouts are expected at the polls on November 4. The boards of elections all over the country are recruiting and hiring plenty of extra workers to handle the expected long lines as people show up to cast their votes.

Even before the final presidential contenders were decided, nearly one in 65 adult Americans signed up to vote in just the first three months of the year. New voter registrations were up about 64 percent from the same period in the last presidential election.

That’s good news that people are inspired by the candidates. During the primaries especially, registrations seemed to be particularly strong for blacks and women who have never voted before but now were moved to get involved because of their support for either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton.

A lot of people are saying they didn’t have a strong emotional connection to any of the candidates before this year. It’s great to see such excitement and inspiration for an election that will give us either the first black president, the first female vice-president, and/or the oldest ever elected.

Historically, only a little more than 50 percent of eligible Americans vote in U.S. presidential elections. It certainly looks like a lot more than half of our citizens are going to the polls this year. Between the economy and Iraq, education and foreign policy, there’s just too much at stake to let everybody else decide.

Related Posts

Presidential List

Too Competitive = Bad News for Democrats

The Race for Vice-President