"He never voted before," Joan Willis said as she handed in Cook's completed application and picked up an absentee ballot. "It's time."

Like sand through the hourglass, so were the minutes left to register. So the procrastinating citizenry rushed over, taking buses, riding bicycles and borrowing cars to make it to the fifth-floor offices on time.

As the day wore on, the harried clerks who accepted applications from 8:30 a.m. to midnight heard a litany of melodramatic excuses for why the procrastinators had waited so long to exercise their right to vote.

"I forgot."

"I thought I could do it online."

"Life got ahead of me."

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The frenzy was much the same throughout registration offices in the suburbs, where lines were out the door. Voter registration forms had to be postmarked by midnight or submitted in person yesterday.

"It happens every year, but not on this scale," Tim Dowling, election finance and document specialist for the registration office, said as he tore perforated edges off form after form. "It looks as if every man, woman, child and fetus in Philadelphia is registering."

In March, Dowling, 45, who has worked for the office for 22 years, predicted record-breaking numbers. "I said we'd beat 300,000 and we're getting close."

As of 2 p.m. yesterday, the office reported 256,000 new registrations in Philadelphia County - already surpassing the number of newly registered voters in the last presidential election.

Dowling said between people sprinting toward the deadline, the armfuls that get-out-the-vote groups were delivering, and the bales of applications coming in the mail, he wouldn't be surprised if 11,000 more landed.

Working on behalf of her ailing boyfriend, Willis had driven frantically around Upper Darby on Saturday, searching for a place to pick up a registration form. The only office she could find was a McCain campaign storefront, she said.

"I'm for Obama, so that was kind of funny."

She took the form to her boyfriend's hospital room and had him fill it out right away, "I wasn't taking any chances with the post office. I had to hand deliver it."

Wydia Kase, an 18-year-old criminal justice student at Community College of Philadelphia, was acting on her boyfriend's behalf as well. "He had this mentality that it won't matter. But I told him every vote counts."

The clerk handed her back the application.

"You need to fill this in, " she said briskly, picked up one of the phones, "Registration, please hold," then turned back to Kase. "His driver's license. Here."

Kase took out her pink cell phone and reached her boyfriend at work. "This is important," she told him.