Nov 5, 2004 By Christine Haines 3 min read

WASHINGTON – Washington County voters turned out in record numbers for this week’s election, and voter registration is at an all-time high, according to the director of the county’s election and registration bureau. “About 96,000 ballots were cast. With the provisional ballots and absentee ballots, we could be over 100,000,” said director Larry Spahr, who noted that the county saw a 70 percent voter turnout.

The next highest number of ballots cast, 84,000, was recorded in the 1984 presidential election.

“In 2000, voter turnout was about 63 percent, but we only had 134,000 on the registration rolls,” Spahr added.

County voters cast 3,000 to 3,500 provisional ballots Tuesday, Spahr said, and they all need to be counted within seven days of the election.

The provisional ballots were new this year, allowing people to cast ballots when they weren’t listed on the voter rolls in the precinct where they showed up to vote. The county’s board of elections must determine the validity of those ballots.

“We have to ascertain whether the person is registered, whether the ballot was cast in the appropriate precinct, and if it was in the wrong district, which votes get counted,” Spahr said.

For example, he said, if a ballot is cast by a registered voter in the wrong precinct, the national and statewide votes would count, but votes for any office specific to that precinct but not the one where the voter was really registered would not count.

Spahr said the election office had to send additional provisional ballots Tuesday to precincts 2 and 4 in California Borough, where there was a recent push for registration of college students.

“We re-supplied them four times. We really didn’t know what to anticipate,” Spahr said.

Only 103 provisional ballots were used countywide in the spring, and nearly that many were used in California Borough alone on Tuesday, he said.

“In a close race, these votes could be critical. If they are not tabulated properly, you could have a skewed outcome,” Spahr said.

Spahr reported about 10,000 new voters registered in Washington County this year, with about 6,500 processed after Aug. 31.

“They were all scanned in, but they may not have been printed on the roll book in the precinct,” Spahr said.

Additionally, he said voters cast about 5,000 absentee ballots, nearly 40 percent higher than usual and equal to the population of the city of Monongahela.

Spahr said that with the increased voter registration in the county, the disparity between registered Democrats and Republicans is closing. The county now has 82,850 Democrats and 43,783 Republicans.

“It used to be 2.5 to 1 about 20 years ago. Now it’s about 1.8 to 1, so the Democrat-Republican gap is narrowing in Washington County,” Spahr said. “(President) Bush only lost Washington County by about 500 votes. There were a lot of people who crossed party lines, and we still have the provisional and absentee ballots to be counted. This election should shake up the foundations of the Democratic Party.”