State election officials are predicting a record turnout Tuesday, and that’s no suprise to local clerks.
“We’re inundated,” said Wendy Walsh Young, town clerk in Loudon, when asked to describe requests for absentee ballots and voter registration forms.
“We have been overwhelmed, so many absentee ballots, and new registers. Just since Oct. 1, I think I have added 60 people (to voting rolls),” she said in a quick phone interview between her pre-election duties on Monday morning.
In Allenstown, Town Clerk Kathleen Pelissier agreed.
“I have had swarms of people calling in and coming in to register. I know we’re going to have quite a few tomorrow,” she said.
New Hampshire allows voter registration on the day of an election.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner has predicted that 738,606 ballots will be cast in the state Tuesday, which would be a record for numbers as well as percentage, equal to roughly 72 percent of eligible voters. In 2008, 70 percent of New Hampshire voters cast ballots for the presidential race, one of the three highest rates of any state in the country: national turnout was 57.5 percent that year.
The secretary of state’s website says New Hampshire had 919,126 registered voters in New Hampshire as of Oct. 7, with undeclared voters (351,984) outnumbering adherents of the two parties: 295,687 Republicans and 271,455 Democrats.
In 2012, 710,972 votes were cast in the presidential election in New Hampshire.
