NC registration 'unprecedented'
Posted: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 6:43 PM by Mark Murray
From NBC/NJ's Carrie Dann
Hot off the presses: New numbers from the North Carolina Board of Elections show that, since the first of the year, more than 165,000 new voters have registered to participate in advance of the state's May 6 primary.
That puts the total of new registered voters in the state since January 2007 at almost 522,000. For comparison's sake, that's more than TWICE the amount of new voters registered during the same time period before the 2004 election.
Forty-five percent of the new voters since January are registered as Democrats, with about 30% unaffiliated and 25% Republican. About a third are under 24 years old.
Gary Bartlett, the director of the Board of Elections, says that the number of new registrants is "through the roof" and "absolutely, totally unprecedented."
"2004 was our bellwether year," he said, when previous records were broken by spikes in registration over the summer before the November election.
This cycle's numbers, he projects, will be three to four times higher.
Bartlett has already started instructing county election officials to start reconsidering the number of ballots, volunteers, and voting machines they will need on primary day.
