Sally Bull/SPPSA volunteer alphabetizes registration applications before the voter registration deadline.
Click here for a photo gallery inside the Montgomery County Registrar's office.
"I think I processed about two or three absentee ballot applications today because the rest of the time I was answering phones," Wertz said.
Yet, despite the lack of headway during the day, the deadline to register to vote passed yesterday without a noticeable hitch. Wertz had worried that voter registration drives would, in a repeat of an episode from the 2005 gubernatorial election, deliver a thousand registration forms within minutes of the 5 p.m. deadline to have the registrations delivered.
Instead, several campaigns brought boxes of registration forms into Wertz's office around 2 p.m. yesterday totaling 1,000 forms, Wertz estimated. With roughly 1,500 registration forms on hand, the registrar's office has until the statewide deadline of seven p.m. Friday for all registration forms to be processed.
Getting all of the registration forms into the statewide voter database is a tedious and difficult process.
When a voter registration form appears in Wertz's office, the forms are first cut apart. The top part of the form is discarded, the middle filed by the registrar's staff and the bottom mailed off to a registrant's former locale to cancel the previous registration. Much of the paperwork is handled by members of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program.
One volunteer, Candace Grindel of Christiansburg, said that she's worked almost 40 hours at the registrar's office in the previous few weeks. Presiding over five stacks of registration forms and a tub of KwikSort, a lubricant that prevents those doing paperwork from having to lick their fingers time after time, Grindel said that the urge to get things done has kept her at a small desk on the side of the office for up to 7 hours in a single sitting.
"I'm thinking, 'Oh, I just want to get this pile done,' and then I look up and it's 7 hours later," Grindel said.
Penmanship also poses significant problems for the registrar's office.
"It's a challenge. We have to go to the telephone directory or the Internet to look their names up sometimes," said Virginia Giles of Christiansburg, another RSVP volunteer. With registrations from students, Wertz said he sometimes searches student names online at vt.edu to help clarify poor handwriting.
After the forms are alphabetized, they go to the two deputy registrars, Wertz and members of the Montgomery County Board of Elections to be entered into the statewide voter registration system.
And then there are the phones.
An automated phone message of indeterminate origin circulated around Tech's campus Thursday and Friday of last week, asking students to call Wertz's office to check on the status of their voter registration.
"Students are getting antsy about their cards," said George Hemingway, assistant registrar. "What most of the students don't realize is yes, they handed over a voter registration form over to a voter drive. But that doesn't mean that it came to us the same day."
While Hemingway said he understands concerns from students who had not yet received their voter registration, he said that the volume of applications has prevented the office from sending out forms at a rapid pace.
Further, when information is left off registration forms, the registrar's office calls the applicant to fill in the missing information. Wertz said almost100 students had left their social security numbers off of their forms. When called about the missing information, Wertz said that students had told him that they wanted to register but were uncomfortable with providing social security numbers to voter registration personnel. When this happens, registrar personnel add the missing information to the forms if provided by applicants. If not, they discard the applications.
Additionally, another 100 students attempted to register to vote in other states by turning in Virginia registration forms. These students were contacted but the registrar's office cannot process these students.
Wertz said that his office typically enters between 400 and 500 registration forms a day. Salem City Registrar Dana Oliver said that in addition to her two trips to the Wertz's offices in the Government Center in Christiansburg to help enter data, she took roughly 1,000 registrations from Wertz back to Salem to be entered by staff in Oliver's office.
Wertz and his staff have been working 12-hour days, seven days a week, for the last two weeks, Wertz said. They will extend their schedule an hour over the next three days in order to meet the deadline.
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