Democrats Registering In Record Numbers

"Anybody who came here illegally should have to leave, and I mean now," Landsberg said. "If McCain's not offering me that, I don't really see what he's offering. A vote for Clinton at least means you vote against Embowa, instead of voting for McCain, which is a vote against nobody."

He dropped his form over the counter and watched it disappear into the stack.

16-Hour Days

At 5 p.m., Poucher locked the front door at voter services and stared at the mound of registration forms piled behind the counter. Wake County had received at least 16,000 forms in the past week, and hundreds more would arrive by mail. At about three minutes per form, Poucher's office had just inherited more than 800 hours of work.

Poucher, 60, planned to work 16-hour days for the next week -- a schedule made complicated because the busiest election of her life had collided with one of her life's craziest times. Her husband died two years ago, leaving her to raise three grandchildren on her own. On Friday, she rushed home from the office at 6 p.m., dismissed the daytime nanny, fed her two dogs, readied her 11-year-old grandson for hockey practice and doled out vitamins for her twin 9-year-old grandsons.

While her night-shift nanny helped put the twins to bed, Poucher retreated upstairs to her laptop. She wanted to input data for at least 150 new voters by the end of the night.

It was pretty mindless work, really, and her fingers danced while her mind wandered. She thought about her husband, his ashes in an urn on the shelf above her. She thought about 1972, when she ran for local office in Chicago and learned the devastating power of each individual ballot. She lost by 12 votes.

Mostly, she thought about the names on the screen in front of her. Who were they? What did they look like? Whom would they vote for? Each form held its own mystery, a new character to ponder in the electoral drama to come.