Clay County has "robust" response to voter registration extension

It looks like Florida voters took advantage of the one week extension granted because of Hurricane Matthew.

A federal judge pushed back the deadline to register to vote in the November election by a week following a lawsuit from Florida Democrats claiming they had to cancel events and many prospective voters had to evacuate, so more time was needed. You had to have an application in by 5 PM Tuesday, October 18^th, to be eligible to vote.

Clay County Supervisor of Elections Chris Chambless says they had close to one thousand registrations dropped off during the one-week extension, and he expects a few hundred more that were mailed will be rolling in through the rest of the week.

“We had a very robust turnout with regards to voter registration in the past week,” he says.

In order to keep up with the extension, as well as a change in how mail-in ballots with mismatched signatures are processed, Chambless says many in his office have been working long days.

“We’ll be confident that all of those [registrations] will be inputted in to the state voter registration database in time for early voting to begin,” he says.

Early voting in Clay County is 7 AM to 7 PM and begins Monday. There are about 146,000 registered voters in the county.

WOKV has reached out to other local Supervisors about the registrations they received in the last week and will update you as that information comes in.