LA COUNTY REGISTERS THOUSANDS OF VOTERS DURING CLOSE OF REGISTRATION EVENT

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                  
October 22, 2008                                               

CONTACT: Marcia Ventura (562) 462-2726 or
                     Eileen Shea    (562) 462-2648

LA COUNTY REGISTERS THOUSANDS OF VOTERS

DURING CLOSE OF REGISTRATION EVENT

Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan announced today that his office received nearly 20,000 voter registration transactions on Monday, October 20^th – the final registration date for the November 4, 2008 Presidential General Election.  The registration forms were collected in conjunction with the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s (RR/CC) Close of Registration event. 

“Partnering with the community and the League of Women Voters, we staffed 14 registration sites throughout the County and most were open until 12 midnight,” Logan said.  “As a result, literally thousands of eligible Los Angeles County citizens were able to come out and register before the legal deadline.  We even had a few registrants showing up in their pajamas.”

Registration activity in L.A. County continued to break records last week.  The final total for registered voters for the November Presidential Election is expected to be well over 4.2 million.  The County has already issued 803,122 Vote By Mail ballots and more than 3,500 voters have visited the RR/CC headquarters in Norwalk to cast their ballots early for the November 4^th election.

RR/CC staff assisted voters with registration questions, helped them fill out forms, provided voter education materials and accepted Vote by Mail ballot applications at the fourteen locations throughout the County.  Registration activity remained steady from 5:00 PM – when the program began – through midnight, California’s legal cutoff for accepting registrations and changes prior to the election.

Each of the sites registered hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of voters.  At the RR/CC headquarters in Norwalk 7,776 voter registration forms showed up between 5:00 PM and midnight.  Nearly 2,000 registered at city halls in Long Beach and West Hollywood.  The RR/CC’s partnerships with Wendy’s restaurants and Starbucks produced large numbers as well with three Starbucks coffee shops accommodating over 3,000 registrants, while five participating Wendy’s franchises took in almost 4,000 registrations.

In anticipation of record high voter turnout on Election Day, the RR/CC has implemented several new programs to assist voters with registrations and election inquiries.  These include a new voter registration look up function on the RR/CC web site at www.lavote.net.  Voters can log in and click on the “Voter Registration Status” button on the web site’s main page, enter their last name, date of birth, house number and zip code and the system will check their registration status and provide links to polling place and other voter information.

Logan noted, however, that new registrants should wait a week to 10 days to utilize the function.  “Although we will have all registrations entered by Election Day, we are busy processing forms we have on hand as well as those that came in through our Close of Registration event, so there will be a lag time from when the registrant filled out the form to when we enter it into the system,” he said.

To help with the last minute rush, staff from the City of Los Angeles partnered with the RR/CC last week to help with voter registration processing and phone support.  Over 120 phone operators have been trained and added at the RR/CC headquarters and two additional sites.  The phone banks will continue to field calls through Election Day.

Phone calls jumped from an average of 3,500 per day to a record-breaking 35,000 on Monday.  Fifty percent of calls received yesterday were regarding voter registration.  Logan encouraged voters with Internet access to utilize the web-based services available to voters at www.lavote.net.

Persons requiring multilingual assistance in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog/Filipino or Vietnamese regarding information in this press release, can call (800) 481-8683.

 

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