Local town clerks validate what national surveys are showing — young people are engaged by the election, and many of them are getting behind Barack Obama.

"We received new registrations from voters aged all across the spectrum, but especially many young people voting for the first time," said Newburyport City Clerk Richard Jones.

Voter registration is up across the board locally, and Jones suspects that Newburyport may have reached the highest number of registered voters in the city's history, though the city's population has remained relatively steady for many years.

Amesbury experienced the biggest surge in voters in the region, jumping almost 10 percent, from 10,821 in 2004 to 11,950 this year. Salisbury came in a close second, increasing from 5,387 to 5,947 registered voters in the four-year span.

Many of those new voters are young, some voting in a presidential election for the first time. Rock the Vote, which focuses on young voters, registered more than 2.3 million this year, compared with more than 1.4 million voters in 2004.

Gardiner Bacon, who ran for mayor of Newburyport last year at the age of 18, has noticed a lot more interest and activism in this election from people his age.

"I worked for Kerry/Edwards in '04 and I was probably the only person under the voting age working on the campaign," said Bacon, an education and film double-major at Bennington College. "Times have changed. I've seen a lot of individuals in the campus community really get involved."

Bacon, 19, worked in the local field office during Deval Patrick's gubernatorial race, worked on local political campaigns and served for 18 months on Newburyport's Youth Commission, which advises the city's Youth Services Department on policies and programs.

Bacon said many of his peers are concerned with the war in Iraq and social issues.

"Young people have a more open view of foreign policy than our parents do," Bacon said. "Each generation seems to get less and less religious and more open to social issues such as same-sex marriage."

Bacon has noticed that most people his age support Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

"The Obama campaign is really getting out the vote with young people. Young people can identify most with the motto of change that Obama is supporting."

Nationwide, the trend is similar. An AP-Yahoo News Poll conducted late last month found that, among 18- to 29-year-old likely voters, 60 percent supported Obama, 33 percent John McCain and 5 percent Ralph Nader.

In the AP-Yahoo News Poll, when asked how they felt about the upcoming election, 48 percent of the young respondents chose the word "hopeful."

But, able to choose more than one answer, 47 percent of these likely young voters said they were "frustrated."

"This election is one of the most important that we face," Bacon said. "The country is so divided right now. George W. Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president and when people have strong feelings about someone in office, it'll drive out new voters. A lot of people are realizing that this can change."

The group of voters who have been historically pegged as Election Day wild cards could hold the fate of the election in their hands.

Nationwide in the 2004 election, about 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted, up from 36 percent in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. While their impact was not felt as greatly because their vote was more evenly split between George W. Bush and John Kerry, no other age group increased turnout by more than 5 percentage points.

Bacon predicts the youth turnout to be somewhat higher than previous years, due to the abundant coverage in the media.

Many town clerks have noticed that young voters are getting a head-start on voting. More than 184,000 voters in Massachusetts have already requested absentee ballots and more than 71,000 have returned them, which is significantly more than the last presidential election, Secretary of State William Galvin said.

"I predict this will be a record turnout and will test all of our systems and new voting machines," Jones said. "I'm confident that everything will go smoothly."

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Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.