Voter Registration

Today is the deadline for Californians to register to vote in the Feb. 5 election. The ballot features local and state measures and the presidential primary candidates. Normally, voters must register at least 15 days before an election, which would have made the deadline Monday. But it was extended to today because of the holiday commemorating the birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., said Kate Folmar, press secretary for Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

The presidential primary season has not yet confirmed a nominee in either major party, but it has already notched a different political accomplishment: It has driven more people to participate in the process. More people have registered to vote, and many states have reported record voter turnout in the primary contests and caucuses so far.

Earlier this year, Ohio election officials sent notices marked "Do not forward" to the state's registered voters, alerting them to the March primary. To the surprise of voting rights activists, 573,444 notices were returned as undeliverable in five counties alone, including the urban areas of Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. The heavy return rate alarmed liberal activists.

For months, Barack Obama's presidential campaign said it would capture traditionally Republican states this fall by registering more African Americans, younger Americans and other voters, in essence reshaping the electorate. Now, the results of that ambitious effort are coming into view. Today is the deadline for new voters to register in many of the battleground states that will probably decide the election, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Indiana and Colorado.

With less than a week to sign up voters in many states, registration groups have revved up their efforts to target young people where they live: on their cellphones, computers and video games. Rock the Vote, the nation's largest youth registration group, recently launched a feature on Microsoft's Xbox 360 that allows gamers to request voter registration forms from their handsets.

While everyone's attention was focused on Tuesday night's debate, the well-organized ground game of the well-financed Barack Obama campaign kept on grinding away at its voter registration drives. Missouri is a target state for Obama -- next door to Illinois, once fairly reliably GOP but recently trending Democratic. Why try to persuade traditional voters to go for your man when you can just sign up thousands of new, already committed ones?

Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country. Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law.

John McCain committed a malicious misrepresentation in the last presidential debate when he claimed that ACORN, the liberal activist group, "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." As ACORN acknowledges, it has collected voter registration forms with bogus signatures.

The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud. State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California.

An intense, last-minute surge of voter interest has election officials across California scrambling to keep up with a record number of voter registrations and applications to cast ballots by mail. In many of the state's 58 counties, registrars have hired twice as many temporary workers as they did in 2004, and put them to work in split shifts in a race to enter reams of information into databases from thousands of incoming forms. When Nov.