She opens a drawer, pulls out a card and compares the signature on it with one she has on a petition. She opens another drawer, pulls out another card and compares another signature. Then she does it again. And again.
She kneels. She stands. She kneels. She stands. Just watching her makes your knees hurt.
"She never has to worry about going and working out in the evening, because she's already getting her exercise," says Glenda Clendenin, elections director for Moore County. "Pulling 4,000 cards is not a pleasure necessarily, but it's a part of our job and we have to do it."
Hambrick has the unenviable job of checking that every person who signed a petition to get either Manilla "Bud" Shaver or Gerald Galloway on the ballot for state House of Representatives District 52 is eligible to vote.
She has to make sure that each and every person who signed a petition is a real, living person who is registered to vote in the correct district. A quick look at the list shows that about one out of every 20 people agreed to sign something they had no business signing.
Hambrick has to fish out the voter identification card that corresponds to each signature and visually make sure they match. Both Shaver and Galloway need more than 2,000 signatures to get on the ballot. (For people who registered to vote after 2005, though, the signatures are scanned on a computer and Hambrick can check them from her desk.)
A lot of squatting and standing is going on all across the state as counties adjust to an election season in which an unusually large number of unaffiliated candidates are trying to get on the ballot.
Nearly a quarter of North Carolina's 100 counties have at least one of them running for office at some level, according to the Moore County Board of Elections.
Fielding Calls
Clendenin sent an e-mail to elections boards in all 100 counties to ask if they had any unaffiliated candidates.
She had been fielding calls from counties asking for her advice on the best way to execute the procedure to get these candidates on the ballot.
Of those who responded, six counties have unaffiliated candidates hoping to get on the ballot for sheriff, one has a candidate for clerk of court, two for register of deeds, and one county has two unaffiliateds running for district attorney.
There are 10 counties with unaffiliated candidates running for county commissioner. And two unaffiliated candidates are running for House of Representatives in Districts 65 and 30.
Then there are the two candidates seeking to place themselves on the ballot through petition in Moore County. Both Manila "Bud" Shaver, a lifelong Republican, and Gerald Galloway, a longtime Democrat, are running unaffiliated campaigns for the 52nd District seat in the N.C. House of Representatives.
There is no guarantee that all or any of the prospective candidates in all those counties will actually get on the ballot. They still have to have the required number of verifiable signatures to their prospective elections boards by noon on June 30 -- this coming Friday.
"No exceptions," Clendenin says.
'Heightened Interest'
"It seems to me that there is heightened interest," Clendenin says of the number of candidates running without party labels around the state.
The obvious question is why.
It's a question that's difficult to answer. Here in Moore County, Shaver has said that he wanted to enter the race because the state Republican Party angered him by throwing its support behind Pinehurst hair salon owner Joe Boylan's successful challenge against state Rep. Richard Morgan.
Boylan defeated Morgan, speaker pro tem and former co-speaker, in the May Republican primary.
Some have alleged that Shaver is simply a Morgan supporter who wants to try to defeat Boylan to show up the state party -- Morgan's second chance, so to speak. Shaver has vehemently denied those charges.
Some have wondered whether unaffiliated House candidates would also pop up in counties where Morgan's Republican allies also suffered defeat in the primary, but there's no evidence of that.
As for Galloway, he says he got into the race because the county needs a "mainstream candidate." Others have implied that Galloway, who has spent most of his life as a registered Democrat, is the Democratic Party's belated attempt to sneak into office now that the powerful Morgan is out of the picture.
Easier Said Than Done
The Moore County House race aside, why do other counties across the state suddenly seem to have so many people interested in becoming candidates after the primary is over? No one has any easy answers, and the state Board of Elections didn't return calls asking for comment.
Further complicating the issue is that for races such as the House, gaining the required number of signatures is often far easier said than done.
"You have to organize almost a campaign to get it going," Clendenin says.
One of the possible reasons for the large number of unaffiliated candidates this year is that there are more voters who also choose not to identify themselves with a particular party. Statewide, unaffiliated voters as a group are growing faster than either of the two major parties.
In Moore County, the number of unaffiliated voters has grown from 2,278 in 1988 to 11,853 this year. That's an increase of more than 400 percent. During the same period, Republican voters have increased by a little over 70 percent since, and the Democratic Party has increased by scarcely 7 percent.
Since 2000, unaffiliated voters are up almost 34 percent, Republicans are up 5.5 percent and Democrats are down 6.7 percent.
In general, the number of registered voters has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. It's up about 10,000 since 1996.
More Work
But Clendenin doesn't think that the unaffiliated candidates in Moore County are making a special effort to take advantage of growing numbers of unaffiliated voters.
"I don't see a connection between the unaffiliated and these two candidates," she says.
One thing that's easy to see is that having unaffiliated candidates doesn't make her job any easier.
"I can't say that many directors would say that petition verification is the favorite part of their jobs," Clendenin says.
With Hambrick slowly digging through the filing cabinets, standing and crouching while doing the menial work of comparing signatures, one would think that the Board of Elections offices would be a depressing or stressful place.
But that's obviously not the case. The workers have smiles on their faces and seem to be in genuinely good moods as they go about the job of helping make the machine of democracy run smoothly and reliably. They even laugh about how much of a pain the job can be.
How do they do it?
"We have Glenda," Hambrick says.
Matthew Moriarty can be reached at 693-2479 or by e-mail at moriarty@thepilot.com.
