University Press (Beaumont, Tex.), Vol. 81, No. 7, Ed. 1 Wednesday, September 29, 2004 Page: 4 of 6
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Page 4 Wednesday, September 29,2004 University Press
New voter turnout expected to rise
ROBERT TANNER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
New voters are flooding local election offices
with paperwork, registering in significantly higher
numbers than four years ago as attention to the
presidential election runs high and an array of
activist groups recruit would-be voters who could
prove critical come Nov. 2.
Qeveland has seen nearly twice as many new
voters register so far as compared with 2000;
Philadelphia is having its biggest boom in new
voters in 20 years; and counties are bringing in
temporary workers and' employees from other
agencies to help process all the new registration
forms.
Nationwide figures aren’t yet available, but
anecdotal evidence shows an upswing in many
places, often urban but some rural. Some wonder
whether the new voters — some of whom sign up
at the insistence of workers paid by get-out-the-
vote organizations — will actually make it to the
polls on Election Day, but few dispute the regis-
tration boom.
“We’re swamped,” said Bob Lee, who over-
sees voter registration in Philadelphia. “It seems
like everybody and their little group is out there
trying to register people.”
Some examples, from interviews with state
and county officials across the country:
— New registered voters in Miami-Dade County,
a crucial Florida county in 2000, grew by 65 per-
cent through mid-September, compared with
2000.
— New registered voters jumped nearly 150 per-
cent in Cuyahoga County (Qeveland) in Ohio,
one of the most hard-fought states this year.
And that’s with weeks left until registration
deadlines fall, beginning in October.
Curtis Gans at the Committee for the Study
of the American Electorate said a clear national
picture won’t emerge until more applications are
processed next month. And Kay Maxwell of the
League of Women Voters cautioned that some
years that promise a boom in new voters turn out
to be duds on Election Day. The danger is that
new voters may not be as committed to showing
up at the polls as longtime voters.
“Turning people out to vote is tougher than
getting them to register,” said Doug Lewis, who
works with local election officials as head of The
Election Center, a nonprofit group.
Rural areas, which trend conservative and
Republican, aren’t necessarily reporting the same
growth as urban, more liberal and Democratic
strongholds: Brazos County, Texas, hasn’t beaten
its 2000 numbers so far, though officials said
applications are now rolling in. The state of
Oklahoma, however, saw new registrations in July
and August increase by 60 percent compared with
four years ago.
Oklahoma officials said they had 16,000 new
Republican registrations, 15,000 new Democrats
and 3,500 new independents. In Oregon, where
new registrations grew by 4 percent from January
through Sept. 1, Democrats outregistered
Republicans two-to-one.
Lewis and others say that no matter what the
partisan breakdown, the registration boom is real
— driven by a swarm of organizations such as
Smack Down Your Vote (a professional
wrestling-connected campaign), Hip-Hop Team
Vote, traditional groups like the League of
Women Voters; party-aligned groups such as
America Coming Together, made up of deep-
pocketed Democrats; and many, many more.
“There seem to be hundreds of them,”
Maxwell said.
The groups’ focus is on states where the vote
was close in 2000, but even in several states where
the election isn’t as competitive, officials say they
are seeing new voters register in higher numbers.
Officials in El Paso County, Texas, Maryland’s
Montgomery County, a suburb of Washington,
D.C., and California’s Los Angeles County said
registration numbers are on pace to be higher
than 2000. '
In many jurisdictions, administrators com-
plain that the crush of new registrations is over-
loading staff
Qerks have hired extra workers in West
Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. Philadelphia bor-
rowed employees from other city agencies and
started working overtime two months earlier than
the usual post-Labor Day push.
In Greenbrier County, W.Va., deputy clerk
Gail White said she’s never seen so many people
register in her 10 years working elections, and
despite extra staff she’s still behind on processing
new and absentee voters. “I get them all typed up,
and the next thing I know, here comes another
pile,” she said.
The reasons seem clear — groups on all sides
were energized by the close election of 2000,
which proved to doubters that a handful of votes
can swing an election. In 2000,9 percent of voters,
roughly 9.5 million people, said that was their first
time casting a ballot, according to AP exit polls.
‘Late Night’ host O’Brien to replace Leno at ‘Tonight Show’
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK - NBC chose the
50th anniversary of the “Tonight”
show on Monday to announce that Jay
Leno will be succeeded by “Late
Night” host Conan O’Brien in five
years — or thousands of jokes from
now.
The unusual succession plan
solves a delicate problem for NBC,
blocking other networks from poach-
ing O’Brien to move him to an earlier
time slot.
“This show is like a dynasty,”
Leno said on Monday’s “Tonight.”
“You hold it and then you hand it off
to the next person.”
Shortly after he signed his latest
contract extension, Leno said NBC
executives approached him, saying
they didn’t want to lose O’Brien. They
all knew O’Brien was likely to jump to
another network if Leno kept doing
the job indefinitely.
He said he agreed O’Brien would
be a good replacement, so he assented
to the succession plan.
“This show has been No. 1, we’ll
keep it No. 1, then we’ll say, ‘Conan,
come on and take it over,” he said.
“You can do these things until they
carry you out on a stretcher or you can
get out while you’re still doing good.”
Leno’s agreement to a 2009 exit,
when he’ll be 59, gives him the chance
to make a smoother transition than
when he took over from Johnny
Carson on May 25, 1992, said Aaron
Barnhart, a Kansas City Star columnist
who once ran a newsletter on late-
night TV news. Leno was criticized
then for not even mentioning his pred-
ecessor.
That seemed clearly on Leno’s
mind Monday, as he offered a warm
tribute to Carson. Leno called him
“the best man ever to hold this job,”
and showed a lengthy clip package of
Carson’s funniest moments.
He said there was a lot of animos-
ity at his takeover, after having beaten
out David Letterman for the job and
“a lot of good friendships were perma-
nently damaged.”
For his first few years at
“Tonight,” Leno trailed Letterman in
ratings and critical respect. But Leno
eclipsed Letterman’s CBS show
among viewers in the 1995-96 season
and hasn’t looked back.
In the season that concluded last
week, “Tonight” averaged 5.8 million
viewers, a 2 percent increase over the
previous year. Letterman’s “Late
Show” on CBS averaged 4.2 million,
up 8 percent from the year before.
Some in the industry privately
thought it odd that Leno, who rarely if
ever misses work, would willingly
place a deadline on himself unless he
was being pushed by NBC.
But Barnhart said the experi-
ences of Leno’s good friend, Jerry
Seinfeld, might have proved that there
is life — and lucrative work — after
giving up the TV gig of a lifetime.
“Seinfeld has proven how you can
move beyond TV and continue to be
as big and as popular and as in
demand as ever without having to
punch the clock every night,” he said.
Leno said Monday he had called
Seinfeld for advice.
“I’m not quitting show business,”
he said. “But I realized I’m not spend-
ing enough time with my cairs.”
O’Brien’s previous contract was
expiring this year. The last time he was
up for a renewal, Fox tried to lure him
with an earlier show, but O’Brien
turned it down at the last minute.
ABC, Fox and even CBS — if
Letterman has any plans to retire him-
self in the next few years — might
have been interested.
In interviews, O’Brien, 41, has
expressed a mixture of ambition and
loyalty to NBC. He debuted in his cur-
rent time slot in September 1993.
“There is the curiosity to take the
show earlier,” O’Brien told The New
York Times last spring. “But if going
to another network for more money
still means being seen by fewer peo-
ple, what are you doing? Then it’s just
an ego thing.”
O’Brien show reaches 2.5 million
viewers a night, dominating its time
slot. The former “Saturday Night
Live” comedy writer was a disaster his
first few months on the air, but recov-
ered to become a critical and com-
mercial success.
Now, a man who once lived on 13-
week contract renewals has signed a
contract with a promise that he will
take over the most famous late-night
show in television in five years. It’s an
enormous expression of faith by NBC,
betting that the fickle nature of public
taste won’t change much in five years.
No decision has been made on
whether O’Brien, whose show is New
York-based, will move to California
for “Tonight,” but that’s considered
likely because its Hollywood connec-
tions help in booking guests, particu-
larly since competitor Letterman is in
New York.
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Show, Mark. University Press (Beaumont, Tex.), Vol. 81, No. 7, Ed. 1 Wednesday, September 29, 2004, newspaper, September 29, 2004; Beaumont, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth500897/m1/4/?q=Lamar+University: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Lamar University.