RALEIGH – Is voter participation about to take a mighty leap upward?

There is certainly a great deal of chatter about the possibility. As North Carolina’s registration deadline came and went last week, many newspapers ran stories about long lines, overburdened elections staffers dealing with bulging sacks of registrations, and first-time voters citing the war in Iraq and other issues as the motivation for stepping forward.

In McDowell County, for example, the local newspaper told the story of Frank and Jo Garland. Frank, 70, and Jo, 66, will this year cast their first ballots ever – for President Bush. Another first-time voter, Justin Revels, isn’t happy about the president’s handling of Iraq. He’ll vote for Kerry, presumably.

The activity has some election officials predicting a turnout of 60 percent or higher in some communities. North Carolina’s turnout has been running a little more than 50 percent in recent presidential years. I’m not yet convinced a surge will happen, particularly since the state board of elections noted a “comparable spike” in registrations before the 2000 race. But the mood does feel different this year. There’s more intensity, more heat, more hate.

The partisan implications of a jump in voter participation are not obvious. Looking back over past elections, there are have been years in which North Carolina had higher turnout and Democratic victories and years with lower turnout and Republican victories. But about as often, it has gone the other way – particularly in cases of competitive races such as Jesse Helms’ campaigns for Senate, where turnout rose but the Republican won. Generally speaking, predictions that anger would generate a strong backlash against a polarizing officeholder have not panned out, as Republicans found to their dismay in 1998 when the furor over President Clinton’s impeachment did not lead to electoral gains (indeed, John Edwards beat Lauch Faircloth and Democrats took back the NC House from a brief period of Republican control).

What does seem likely is that a surge in voter registration will cause confusion and controversy on Election Day. New federal rules will ensure that every voter will get to cast a provisional ballot, no matter how odd the records and situation may appear. Some voter forms have apparently been falsified, often by young activists trying to meet their registration goals. And then there is the familiar problem of the “motor-voter” law that registers voters when they go to get their driver’s licenses. North Carolina’s lax system for issuing licenses has long invited invalid registrations, given that many illegal immigrants have seen the state as a good place to obtain a photo ID. The issue flared up last week with the report that a sheriff in Alamance County had investigated the voter registrations of Hispanics, finding some illegals on the list and threatening to prosecute anyone who sought to vote illegally. This prompted a response from the Raleigh-based advocacy group El Pueblo, which listed the Alamance case among several allegations of attempted voter intimidation.

I don’t know that voter fraud is widespread in North Carolina, though I know that it used to be. I do get very suspicious when political activists oppose even reasonable precautions such as checking voter lists against other records to ensure citizenship and requiring a photo ID at the polling place. Why should voting be easier to do than cashing a check or renting a video?

All this talk of surging voter rolls prompts another observation. We don’t really know what our electorate looks like anymore. Campaigns don’t know, pollsters don’t know, and journalists don’t know. That infuses some drama and suspense into the election cycle. Nothing wrong with that.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.