Rushing to register to vote at the deadline

While Donald Cook, a 41-year-old construction worker, waited in his hospital bed for a heart transplant yesterday, his girlfriend stood in line at the City Commissioners voter registration office on North Delaware Avenue.

"He never voted before," Joan Willis said as she handed in Cook's completed application and picked up an absentee ballot. "It's time."

Like sand through the hourglass, so were the minutes left to register. So the procrastinating citizenry rushed over, taking buses, riding bicycles and borrowing cars to make it to the fifth-floor offices on time.

As the day wore on, the harried clerks who accepted applications from 8:30 a.m. to midnight heard a litany of melodramatic excuses for why the procrastinators had waited so long to exercise their right to vote.

"I forgot."

"I thought I could do it online."

"Life got ahead of me."

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The frenzy was much the same throughout registration offices in the suburbs, where lines were out the door. Voter registration forms had to be postmarked by midnight or submitted in person yesterday.

"It happens every year, but not on this scale," Tim Dowling, election finance and document specialist for the registration office, said as he tore perforated edges off form after form. "It looks as if every man, woman, child and fetus in Philadelphia is registering."

In March, Dowling, 45, who has worked for the office for 22 years, predicted record-breaking numbers. "I said we'd beat 300,000 and we're getting close."

As of 2 p.m. yesterday, the office reported 256,000 new registrations in Philadelphia County - already surpassing the number of newly registered voters in the last presidential election.

Dowling said between people sprinting toward the deadline, the armfuls that get-out-the-vote groups were delivering, and the bales of applications coming in the mail, he wouldn't be surprised if 11,000 more landed.

Working on behalf of her ailing boyfriend, Willis had driven frantically around Upper Darby on Saturday, searching for a place to pick up a registration form. The only office she could find was a McCain campaign storefront, she said.

"I'm for Obama, so that was kind of funny."

She took the form to her boyfriend's hospital room and had him fill it out right away, "I wasn't taking any chances with the post office. I had to hand deliver it."

Wydia Kase, an 18-year-old criminal justice student at Community College of Philadelphia, was acting on her boyfriend's behalf as well. "He had this mentality that it won't matter. But I told him every vote counts."

The clerk handed her back the application.

"You need to fill this in, " she said briskly, picked up one of the phones, "Registration, please hold," then turned back to Kase. "His driver's license. Here."

Kase took out her pink cell phone and reached her boyfriend at work. "This is important," she told him.

James Royal, a minister at the Victory Baptist Church Ministry in North Philadelphia, expected to make several trips to the registration office yesterday. Royal, 64, has been going through his Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, front stoop to front stoop, nudging everyone to register.

"A lot of people don't know how to spell well and are too embarrassed to fill out an application," Royal explained. "So I take extra forms. I tell them, you are going to fill this out in your own hand, and if you mess up, I'll give you another form."

His persistence, he said, has yielded about 60 new registrations - including a 42-year-old handyman who will vote for the first time in his life.

Nov. 4 will be Marc Corkery's maiden ballot as well. "I really want Obama to win," he said. "It seems like he has new ideas."

The 43-year-old resident of the Northeast Community Center for Mental Health was escorted to the registration office by Joe Kleidon, the facility's manager. "We encourage our residents to take part in their community and aspire to be better citizens."

It will be several days before city workers process the avalanche of applications. Part of the job is identifying which applicants are already registered but who sent in new forms just to be sure.

"I didn't vote in the Bush elections" out of anger and a sense of futility, said Teresa Davis, a homemaker from Queen Village. "But I'm not missing this one." Davis, who will turn 50 the day after the election, had come in to double-check that her registration was still active.

"I'd been meaning to get down here, but my with my husband working and my son sick, I kept putting it off."

It appeared from the conversations and campaign buttons that most of the crowd filing in to the Philadelphia office yesterday were Obama supporters - and that included Davis, who said she preferred the Democrat's health-care plan.

Her 14-year-old son has asthma but the family no longer has health insurance, she said. Her husband, who sells surveillance cameras, does not get health benefits from his employer, she said. Private insurance "was costing me more than $700 a month. I had to drop it 18 months ago. That's the reason I'm here."

After checking her name in the computer, the clerk told her, "Yes, you're still in," then asked her to wait. A few minutes later, she handed Davis a new card.

Davis stood there a moment, admiring the small piece of cardboard as though it were something precious.

However enthusiastic the groups trying to increase voter registration may be, their methods may leave some voters unable to cast ballots on Election Day.

The problems are the groups' sometimes sloppy oversight and a bad practice of bundling applications from people who live in different counties, then dropping them all in the Philadelphia office.

Forms have come in missing signatures and addresses.

"We've spent $17,000 in postage sending back incomplete applications," said Tim Dowling, election finance and document specialist for Philadelphia's registration office.

Although he has warned the groups to sort out applications from surrounding counties and deliver them to the correct, respective offices, he has a box with more than 2,500 suburban applications that the staff won't get to until city forms are processed.

That means rerouting forms to other counties, and sometimes back to voters if information is missing.

"We're put in a pickle here," Dowling said. "Some of these people may be disenfranchised."