Lowndes County Elections Supervisor Deb Cox said a deputy had to be called to the elections office on North Oak Street Monday due to the amount of traffic.

“Traffic was backed up both ways on Oak Street and the parking lot was full. We broke up one fight in the parking lot and we had several near accidents and bits of horn blowing and shouted obscenities. A deputy came to the rescue, turned on blue lights and directed traffic for the last couple of hours. He was a godsend.”

With the last day of voter registration Monday came a “mountain” of voter registration forms, according to Cox, as the county is on its way to a record setting year. More than 4,300 have cast their votes so far in this early voting period.

On a statewide scale, a larger, more diverse Georgia electorate will be eligible to vote in next month’s general election than any in the state’s history. While the final numbers aren’t in yet, it’s clear that state voter registration rolls have swelled.

As of Oct. 1, more than 406,000 new voters have been added this year alone, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. That’s a 9 percent jump from the same period leading up to the last presidential contest in 2004.

This year’s tally doesn’t include the final, frenzied push in October.

Volunteers from both the Democratic and Republican parties have been pounding the pavement trying to reach every last unregistered voter.

Officials with the Secretary of State’s office said it could be several days before the final tally for registered voters is available. Elections staff are waiting for registrations with valid postmarks to trickle in by mail.

The ranks of active voters in Georgia has grown by more than 850,000 since the last presidential

election in 2005. There are currently 5.6 million registered voters in Georgia.

Some of the most significant growth has been among minority voters. While whites still make up the majority of the state’s registered voters their influence is gradually slipping.

Today, whites make up 63.5 percent of the state’s electorate. That’s down from 68.1 percent four years ago.

In 2004, blacks made up 27.7 percent of the electorate and now that has inched upward to 29.2 percent.

The could be good news for Democrat Barack Obama, who’s drawing strong support from minority voters in his bid to become the nation’s first black president.

But University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock cautioned that newly-registered voters have traditionally been less likely to return to vote.