At 101, Albemarle woman casts ballot for first time

At 101, Sarah E. Williams might just be the oldest new voter in Virginia.

Williams, of Albemarle County, has lived through 25 presidential elections — from William Howard Taft in 1908 to George W. Bush in 2004 — but had never once voted in her century-long life.

Williams registered to vote Friday afternoon at the Albemarle County Registrar’s Office and cast an early ballot for Democrat Barack Obama.

“Well, we like that boy,” Williams said.

“Young man,” corrected her daughter Mildred Wilson.

Does she think Obama would make a good president?

“Mmm hmm, I do,” Williams replied. “He seems like a nice guy.”

Williams, who is black, was not able to vote in Virginia until the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965. She was 58 years old at the time. For the next 43 years, none of the presidential candidates gave her much reason to head to the polls. This year, however, as Williams watched Obama deliver speeches on TV, she decided that the right man had finally come along.

“She told us that she wanted to vote because she likes Barack’s looks,” said daughter Ann White of Silver Spring, Md. “I’m just proud of her that she’s finally doing it.”

Williams’ age may make her voter registration notable, but she is just one among thousands of newly registered voters this year in the battleground state of Virginia.

As of Sept. 15, there were 184,153 new voters added to the rolls across the state. The vast majority are younger than 25. Only 4.47 percent of the new voters are older than 65.

Like nearly every other corner of the state, the Charlottesville region has seen a sizable influx of new voter registrations in 2008. As of Friday morning, Charlottesville and Albemarle County reported a combined total of 6,913 newly registered voters since Jan. 1.

“They’re coming in at a pretty fast clip,” said Jake Washburne, Albemarle County’s general registrar. In just the last 15 days, he said, Albemarle added 741 residents to the voter rolls.

New Virginia voters are expected to play an important role in the Nov. 4 contest between Obama and GOP nominee John McCain, said University of Virginia politics professor Larry J. Sabato.

“Obama is competitive in Virginia in part because of the new voters,” said Sabato, who is on leave from UVa this semester so he can visit toss-up states. “You change the way Virginia votes by changing the electorate.”

Sabato predicted that more than 300,000 new voters will be registered in Virginia by the Oct. 6 deadline. Many of them will be in the 18 to 29 age demographic, he said, which tends to favor Obama by roughly 20 points. The Obama campaign has made voter registration — particularly among young people and blacks — a central part of its strategy in Virginia.

There was a similarly large amount of voters registered in the run-up to Election Day in 2004. However, in that case, Sabato said, it was the Republicans who were sponsoring the vast majority of voter drives.

Virginia is seeing at least one conservative-leaning voter drive in 2008. A push at Liberty University, a Lynchburg college founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, could register up to 10,500 students, many of whom are likely to lean toward McCain.

Polls show that Obama and McCain remain locked in a razor-thin race in Virginia, which is one of a small handful of swing states. Virginia has not backed a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

As for Williams, after she cast her vote for Obama on Friday, her granddaughter placed on Williams’ trench coat an American flag sticker that said: “I made freedom count. I voted.”

“I’m so proud of you, Grandma,” said Renee Neverson, a graduate student in Washington. “I’m going to tell my children about this one day. It’s amazing that I get to witness my grandmother going through this. I am so blessed.”

As Wilson pushed her mother’s wheelchair out of the Albemarle County government building and into the parking lot, she reflected on how much things have changed in Virginia for a 101-year-old black woman.

“To be real frank about it, African Americans couldn’t vote legally in Virginia until [the ’60s],” she said. “I never pushed the issue of my mother voting. But I just feel that this year, it’s going to be a tight race. Every vote is going to count.”