Registration stays flat

• By MARSHA SHULER
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Oct 20, 2008 - Page: 1A - UPDATED: 12:15 p.m.

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Recent voter registration drives in advance of the Nov. 4 presidential election helped boost voter rolls in the past year by nearly 94,000 — more than half of them black registrants, based on state election statistics analyzed Sunday.

Elections officials reported that some 2.9 million Louisiana voters will be able to cast ballots in the election in which Republican John McCain faces Democrat Barack Obama — the first black presidential nominee of a major political party.

Early voting in Louisiana begins Tuesday for the presidential, congressional and other elections on the Nov. 4 ballot.

While the deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 4 election was Oct. 6, state elections officials did not get the last data until Sunday because of a major backlog in registration processing in Orleans Parish.

The 2.9 million voter registration total didn’t break records in spite of active voter sign-up efforts by Democratic- and Republican-aligned groups, Secretary of State Jay Dardenne said Sunday.

The total fell 2,703 shy of the number of people in Louisiana who were eligible to vote in the 2004 presidential election, when Republican President George W. Bush beat Democratic challenger John Kerry — outpolling Kerry nationally and statewide.

But the 2.9 million total is far ahead of the 2000 presidential election, when there were 2.79 million eligible voters in Louisiana.

Statewide voter registration had dipped from 2.9 million in 2004 to 2.8 million for the next big statewide election — the 2007 governor’s race which Republican Bobby Jindal won in the October primary.

Recent voter registration drives helped make up most of that decline, said Dardenne.

Nevertheless, those drives did not offset the cancellation of voters — or purges from voting rolls — that took place, he said.

Some 180,000 inactive voters were dropped from the rolls in 2005 and 2007 after having not voted at all through two federal elections, he said.

In the statistics, Dardenne said, there is also “a confirmation of the concerns we have had for some time about the loss of population in Louisiana” after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Dardenne noted that Orleans Parish voter rolls had dropped by 41,757 between the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in large part because of hurricane displacements in 2005.