Long before lunch hour, a slow-moving chain of SUVs, sedans and sports coupes had clogged the Salt Lake County Government Center's entrances - not to snag fast food, but to register to vote on the last sign-up day before the Nov. 4 election.
Would-be voters arrived by the thousands, filling out registrations in their front seats while the Clerk's Office moved its operation outdoors to accommodate the last-day crush.
"We have always known it was going to be a high-turnout year," Deputy Clerk Jason Yocom said as prospective voters jammed roads in and around the government complex near 2100 South and State Street.
Salt Lake County is bracing for big numbers at the polls. The Clerk's Office has registered more than 35,500 new voters since last November, pushing the election rolls past 517,000 people. And that's not counting Monday's registrations.
Similar trends have cropped up elsewhere along the Wasatch Front.
Close to 2,000 people clogged the Utah County Clerk's Office on Monday - so many that phones went unanswered and voice mail maxed out, even with 30 temporary workers on hand.
The county had 181,000 registered voters in February and likely will reach 250,000 after Monday's forms are processed, according to Clerk-Auditor Bryan Thompson. That's a jump of 69,000 voters.
What's striking, Thompson added, is the number of new voters between 18 and 24 years old. Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University turned in a combined 4,600 registrations from campus campaigns.
And, in Davis County, the clerk reports 25,000 more registered voters this year than Election Day 2004.
"We've got lines in the hallway," said Clerk-Auditor Steve Rawlings. "We've never had this much interest in an election in the [18] years that I've been with the county."
Bumper-to-bumper registrations continued through the day in Salt Lake County, where the Clerk's Office projected more than 5,000 voter registrations Monday alone - a single-day surge that officials handled in fast-food fashion with a parking lot drive-through.
"It kind of feels like you are going up for a hamburger or something," quipped Lawrence Kitpatrick of Taylorsville.
But with the national economy teetering into recession, a continuing war in Iraq and a historic presidential election just two weeks away, prospective voters seemed willing to wait in lines that sometimes numbered more than 40 vehicles long.
That was the case with Ronnie Brown, a Murray electrician who hasn't registered to vote for more than a decade. He couldn't stay away from the polls this year, not with the upheaval on Wall Street.
"It is pretty important with the economy," he said, explaining that a family member's retirement accounts have plunged hundreds of thousands of dollars. "This is going to be the biggest election in history."
So Brown took a day off work to register. Within 15 minutes of inching into the government center's entrance on 2100 South, he had completed his paperwork and decided to go inside and cast his ballot early.
But the long lines irked veteran Clerk Sherrie Swensen, who blamed the lurch on legislation last year that required prospective voters to show up at the Clerk's Office to register 15 days before the election, rather than sign up at satellite venues such as grocery stores, libraries and other county buildings in the weeks before Election Day.
"It is so frustrating to me," she said. "This is the result."
Brown isn't complaining. He spent his extra hours Monday remodeling his bathroom in Murray. And, more important, he cast his vote for president.
The person he thinks will resolve the nation's economic woes: John McCain.
