OSU basketball coach drives push for voter registrations

With less than a week to sign up new voters, Oregon State University students and Benton County Democrats called on Craig Robinson to rally supporters for a final voter registration drive.

Robinson, the OSU basketball coach and the brother-in-law of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, electrified the 150-plus supporters who packed Obama headquarters at 223 N.W. Second St. at 5 p.m. Thursday.

"I ruined my voice," said the tall, burly Robinson. He explained that he'd earlier conducted practice with the OSU mens basketball team, which was winless last year in Pacific-10 Conference play. "I was not happy."

Robinson was far more optimistic about Oregon's support for his brother-in-law, and he urged those who showed up to take an orange "Campaign for Change" volunteer sign-up sheet and then head out to sign up new voters until next Tuesday, Oct. 14.

The effort has been stunningly successful so far, said Jill Van Buren, Benton County elections supervisor, and the numbers tell the story: As of 8 a.m. on Thursday, Benton County has 50,350 voters compared with 44,663 at the same time last year.

The real shift has been in the number of Democrats, which in recent years always has outpaced Republicans but as of Thursday had outpaced them by 9,291 registrants. Van Buren says hundreds more sign up each day, which has swollen the ranks of Benton County Democrats from 14,616 in October 2007 to 23,840 - and counting.

Among them was Pat Rolla, 67, who moved to Corvallis from Las Vegas in July. She once supported Ronald Reagan, and she supported Hillary Clinton in the primary. But she said she had no regard for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

"Until two weeks ago, he said the economy was doing just fine," Rolla said. She said she registered to vote in Oregon as a Democrat soon after her arrival.

Jessie Castro, an 18-year-old freshman from Lacy, Wash., who is studying biology at OSU, said this is his first election. He is supporting Obama because Castro thinks the war in Iraq will end sooner if Obama is elected.

Rolla and Castro are Democrats who are part of a national increase in Democratic registrations. (See "Voter registration", at right on this page). Although most polls now show Oregon solidly in Obama's column, OSU plans to have a registration desk near the Memorial Union all day Saturday to sign up more new voters.

But the question remains: Will all of those who signed up to vote turn in their ballots?

Miriam Riherd, a campus organizer, told the crowd at Obama headquarters that would be the second part of their campaign - the "Get Out The Vote" part, when volunteers would contact people to ask if they had turned in their ballots.

The county elections office said most people in Benton County will receive their ballots Saturday, Oct. 18. They have until Oct. 30 to mail them in and can drop them off at any authorized ballot box on Election Day, Nov. 4, until 8 p.m.

But it wasn't all business with the Obama supporters.

One man in the crowd, who identified himself only as Paul, said he had two questions for Robinson: Did he think he could take Obama one-on-one on the basketball court, and how would Obama answer that same question?

"My answer is, there is no way he can take me; and his answer would be there is no way he can take me - but the moral of this is: Now that's a man with good judgment."