Voter Interest in N.C. Surging

According to the Raleigh News & Observer, election offices in Durham and Orange counties say they have been so inundated with absentee and registration requests that they have had to add employees to process them.

Rosemary Blizzard, voter registration director for the State Board of Elections, said her staff is amazed at the number of requests for absentee ballots and registration forms. They have received more than 100,000 new registrations since the primary in July.

"I can tell you that it's a lot heavier for this election than it was for 1992, 1996 or 2000," said Orange County Elections Director Carolyn Thomas. "This is probably the heaviest registration that I've seen since I've been here."

As previously reported in this space, new Republican registrations in the state since July make up just 33 percent of total registrations. Republican Party leaders can read that statistic as a sure sign that they're winning North Carolina if they want to -- and apparently they want to -- and we're VERY happy to have them so confident. The rest of you read those statistics as logic dictates, and please keep the results of your reading to yourself.

The biggest factor in the pumped-up new registrations is young people ... a.k.a., draft-age people ... who were so not interested four years ago in the state of the nation, nor in its direction, but who this year are beginning to notice a few things. And you know all those polls that supposedly show El Presidente leading Kerry by 300 percentage points? Those polls almost certainly do not take into account these newly registered young people, who live via cell phones and have no land-lines for pollsters to call. The polls don't know who to poll, very clearly, and are wrong, wrong, wrong because of it.

We do LIKE over-confident Republicans. Our favorite kind.