TUSCALOOSA | Nearly 100,000 voters are registered to cast ballots in Tuesday's Democratic and Republican primaries in Tuscaloosa County.
Registration statewide ended last Friday and the registrars in Alabama's counties had until Wednesday to finish their tabulations and report numbers to the Secretary of State's Office. When all was said and done, that number for Tuscaloosa County was a record 99,341, nearly 10,000 more than were registered for the last election cycle two years ago when we elected a governor, the rest of the state's constitutional officers and an entire Legislature.
But a jump of nearly 10,000 for what are "only" primaries (there is likely to be another big influx of voters registering before the November general election, which Tuscaloosa County will surely pass the 100,000 mark) is unprecedented. So who are all these new voters and what is motivating them?
Well, I talked to the registrars last week and they said they were registering 200 and 300 people a day and most of them were young voters, the demographic that has been energized by the Democratic campaign of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
Draw you own conclusions about what is likely to happen here next Tuesday.
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