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.

Cleveland 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 registration boom.

“We’re swamped,” said Bob Lee, who oversees 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 percent through mid-September, compared with 2000.
• New registered voters jumped nearly 150 percent in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) in Ohio, one of the most hard-fought states this year.

Iowa State University senior Dean Mather, left, registers to vote with prompting from Jarrik Mitchell, another senior, during a New Voters Project drive Thursday to register students on campus in Ames for the election.

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 wouldn’t emerge until more applications were processed next month. And Kay Maxwell of the League of Women Voters cautioned that some years that promised a boom in new voters turned 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 were now rolling in. The state of Oklahoma, however, saw new registrations in July and August increase by 60 percent compared with four years ago.

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.