In the wake of the Harrisonburg voter registration controversy, many people in the Rockingham County area are concerned that they could be possible victims in this incident.
The Rockingham County Sheriff Bryan F. Hutcheson said in his initial press release that his office believes the incident is isolated. That has done little to calm the fears of people in the area who have recently filled out voter registration forms, but have not been seen their registration status updated.
Voters can check the Board of Elections web site to see if they are registered to vote for the November election, but if your name doesn't pop up, that doesn't necessarily mean that your application did not make it to the registrar.
City of Harrisonburg registrar Debbie Logan told me today that her office received a hefty influx of registration forms right before Monday's 5pm deadline. Most of those applications came from students at James Madison University. JMU had many voter registration drives conducted on their campus, by third party groups many of which held on to all of those forms and submitted them all at once. Logan said it could take at least two weeks until they finish processing all those applications.
Logan said they had at least 15 hundred applications to process, but she was confident that they could turn them around in time for those new voters to recieve their updated voter ID cards in time to vote.
That could be a problem for voters concerned that their application may have been tampered with. The applications may not be fully processed until early November. It will leave a short window of time for any action to take place to determine if they are the victim of a crime and for action to take place to allow them access to vote in November.
Once again, the Sheriff's office remains convinced that the problem is isolated to those eight applications found on Monday and not any more. They do recommend that you contact them or your local registrar if you think your application did not make it in on time.
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