Photos by Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Judy Stokes, general registrar of Roanoke County's voter registration office, holds 47 voter applications that were received after the deadline but are valid for November.

Weeta Wilson, a seasonal employee, wears gloves because they help with slippage as she files voter registration forms in the Roanoke County Administration Office. The county is also preparing to handle calls from disgruntled late registrants on Nov. 4.

Judy Stokes of Roanoke County is among the registrars in the region handling a heavy influx of voter applications. One official recommends that anyone wondering if they missed the deadline call their locality's office to check on the application's status.

A huge swell of last-minute voter registrations has swamped registrars' offices in Virginia, and elections officials around the state expect to be examining applications right up until Election Day.

The high volume of applications means that many qualified voters' names didn't make the state's computer-generated list sent earlier this month to local registrars. So registrars' workers are busily hand-writing them in the roll books that go to polling stations.

The crush of registrations mailed near or on the Oct. 6 deadline also spells disappointment at the polls for those whose applications didn't get postmarked on time.

Thousands of registration applications have been received after the deadline at the Virginia State Board of Elections in Richmond, and more are coming in daily, said Nancy Rodrigues, the agency's secretary.

"It's unbelievable," Rodrigues said about the volume of late-arriving applications. "Last week we had about 4,000," and many were ineligible. "Some people wrote Oct. 6" on their registration forms, she said, "but they were postmarked Oct. 7."

In many cases, voters who missed the deadline will be unaware because registrars say they don't have the manpower to send out notification letters.

"I'm expecting a lot of calls on Election Day from people who didn't pay enough attention to when their applications were sent in," said Barbara Gunter, registrar in Bedford County.

Gunter is also bracing for angry outbursts by would-be voters, who will wait in the expected longer-than-usual lines to vote only to discover they aren't registered because their applications were postmarked after the cutoff.

"We always get some calls from people who say, 'I know I filed my registration.' But this year there will be more of them," Gunter said.

In Roanoke County, Judy Stokes, the general registrar, said she has hired two temporary workers to handle calls from disgruntled late registrants on Nov. 4.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Stokes said she had 47 valid registrations that arrived too late to be printed on the list of registered voters used by poll workers.

Randall Wertz, voter registrar in Montgomery County, said about 250 late applications have been received at his office. He recommends that anyone who wonders if their registration missed the deadline should call his office to see if their form is in the stack of late registrations.

Inevitably, he said, some will wait until Election Day to inquire. "They'll drive by and see the long lines and think maybe they should find out if they're registered before a long wait."

Voter registrations are up by more than 30,000 in the Roanoke and New River valleys since the last presidential election. The number of voters in the state has ballooned by 504,000, according to data from the Virginia State Board of Elections. More than 5 million Virginians are registered to vote now.

Regardless of the postmark date, Rodrigues' office is bound by state law to forward each one to the registrar in the appropriate locality in which the voters would cast ballots. Those local officials have the final say.

The computerized list of registered names issued by the elections board, according to its Web site, is the "official list of qualified voters."

Rodrigues said adding names by hand has been a common practice in past elections, although not in this year's volume. However, nothing on the state board's Web site mentions hand-writing in voters' names.

Dan Ortiz, a professor of election law at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said that while he isn't familiar with state law regulating that process, there's "potential for a real mess" if legally challenged.

For either political party to press an objection in court against the last-minute handwritten additions, there would have to be a claim that in some way they conflict with federal election law, or the Constitution, he said.

"Whether that is legally objectionable or not, I can't say" without knowing more about the practice and any legal precedent regarding it under federal law, Ortiz said.

But spokesmen for the state's two major political parties raised no immediate concerns about the processing of voter registration applications.

State Democratic Party spokesman Jared Leopold said party officials are not aware of any "systematic problems" but hope elections officials ask for additional manpower if needed to complete the processing.

"One of the things we want to ensure ... is that everyone who is on the rolls has a chance to vote," Leopold said.

Rodrigues said that the accuracy and integrity of Virginia's voter rolls are being protected by her office and the registrars. Her staffers and workers in the registrars' offices "are killing themselves" to get all eligible voters registered and the records ready for Nov. 4, she said.

In addition to her staff of 28, Rodrigues said she has been able to recruit hundreds of volunteers, many of them retired state workers, and paid employees of other Virginia agencies, to process voter applications. Some have been temporarily transferred from jobs in social services, motor vehicle registration and taxation.