New Voters Beat Deadline to Register

Some of the students had never cared about politics before. Others said they had been too busy to register.

But faced with their last chance Tuesday, first-timers eager to register to vote crowded around Agnes Goodman’s table at Pierce College on Tuesday afternoon.

Goodman, vice president of the Valley West Democratic Club in Woodland Hills, happily helped about 35 students fill out their forms.

“I didn’t think one vote really mattered,” said Branden Marks, 20, of West Hills. “[But] my grandma said if I didn’t vote, that’s giving a vote to someone else.”

About 20 people registered at the state headquarters of the California Republican Party office in Burbank, said spokesman Stuart DeVeaux. Many people called asking for directions for registering, DeVeaux said.

“The phones have been ringing off the hook with people wanting to register Republican,” he said.

Another 30 citizens also registered Tuesday at the office of Pueblo y Salud in San Fernando, said Anibal Guerrero, project coordinator for a monthlong drive in the Pacoima area that has registered 1,200 voters for the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a nonpartisan organization based in Texas that works to increase Latinos’ political clout.

“It’s the last-minute people who say, ‘Wow, if I want to make a difference, today is the day.’ I think they see this as something important they need to do,” he said.

At Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, a dozen voters were registered by a group supporting Proposition 35, an initiative that would make it easier for state and local governments to contract privately for engineering and design work. “Because it was the last day,” said Taxpayers for Fair Competition spokeswoman Rochelle Lewis, “we thought it would be a productive way to get our message out to the public and to help a lot of people who were going to miss the deadline. It’s close enough to the election where people are starting to pay attention to the issues.”

Los Angeles Registar-Recorder/County Clerk Conny McCormack estimated that about 80,000 people countywide registered in the last week before the cutoff. That still would be less than the 92,000 who registered during the same period four years ago, McCormack said.

McCormack attributed the drop to more people registering at DMV offices. Since Aug. 1, 260,000 people have signed up, she said. It seems there are always people who wait until the last minute, whether it’s registering to vote or filing their income tax returns, she added.

“It’s a procrastinator gene some people seem to have,” she said.

At Pierce, student Tracy Wagner said she wasn’t a procrastinator--she’d just been too busy with midterm exams. She also wanted to learn more about the issues, she said.

“I never really followed politics and I didn’t want to vote on what I didn’t know about,” said the 21-year-old Canyon Country resident. “Now I’m going to find out--a little late, I guess.”