Voter registration

So I did some number crunching when the secretary of state's office released the voter registration list for the May primary. Among the things I found:

-- Lincoln County has 112 percent voter registration. Out of 8 people old enough to vote, 9 are registered. Those people are really civic minded.

-- These are the counties, in order, with the highest percentage of people declaring themselves "no party": Jefferson, Berkeley, Morgan, Mineral and Monongalia. What they have in common is that at least three of these five are among the fastest-growing counties in West Virginia.

-- These are the counties with the lowest percentages of independent voters. You will notice they are southern coal counties that for the most part are having a hard time economically: Mingo, Logan, Webster, Boone, Wyoming. (Webster is the exception).

-- Democrats still outnumber independents 6.4 to 1 in West Virginia. And they still are 56.2 percent of the electorate. It will be a long time or it will take a political catastrophe for their dominance in the state to change, especially when a lot of officeholders who are elected as Democrats are really Republicans at heart.