Still the only voter ID anyone should need
More than 14 millions Texans have registered to vote in the November elections, the secretary of state’s office announced Thursday, calling the number a record high.
The total marks an increase of 2.8 percent since the most recent presidential contest and 5.7 percent since the last time candidates for governor were on the ballot.
More attention than usual is being paid to voter registration this year. Groups such as Battleground Texas have been working to “expand the electorate” to make the state competitive for Democrats.
Oct. 6 was the last day to register to vote. Early voting begins Monday for the elections on Nov. 4.
Far as I can tell, that’s based on this tweet from the Secretary of State’s office. They have not yet updated their Turnout and Voter Registration Figures page, but we do have this page, which gives the total enrollment number as 14,025,441, as well as suspense file numbers and a county-by-county breakdown. I’ll get to the latter in a second, but first here’s a look at the numbers over time:
Date Reg voters % of VAP
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Mar 06 12,722,671 76.47
Nov 06 13,074,279 78.58
Mar 08 12,752,417 71.90
Nov 08 13,575,062 76.54
Mar 10 13,023,358 69.31
Nov 10 13,269,233 71.00
Mar 12 13,065,425 71.47
Nov 12 13,646,226 74.65
Mar 14 13,601,324 71.91
Nov 14 14,025,441 74.15
So the number of registered voters is up about a million from this time in 2010. That’s five times the growth from November 2006 to November 2010. Not too shabby. How it translates into turnout and what that turnout looks like is of course still to be determined. But as noted, this was one of the key pillars of the Battleground Texas plan. It’s encouraging to see that this part of it has worked as well as it has so far.
And because I can never leave it at that, here are the 20 counties that saw the greatest increase in registrations since 2010:
County 2014 Voter Reg 2010 Voter Reg Reg Diff
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HARRIS 2,062,792 1,937,850 124,942
TARRANT 999,687 936,735 62,952
COLLIN 485,406 424,672 60,734
DALLAS 1,203,513 1,145,427 58,086
FORT BEND 363,147 309,026 54,121
BEXAR 957,110 905,859 51,251
TRAVIS 655,056 604,374 50,682
DENTON 407,040 364,593 42,447
WILLIAMSON 271,612 237,763 33,849
MONTGOMERY 281,496 249,954 31,542
EL PASO 403,979 379,727 24,252
HIDALGO 318,772 296,510 22,262
BELL 168,877 154,566 14,311
BRAZORIA 183,488 170,784 12,704
CAMERON 186,563 174,188 12,375
GUADALUPE 84,076 74,783 9,293
GALVESTON 191,961 182,802 9,159
COMAL 82,137 73,750 8,387
HAYS 106,581 98,210 8,371
ELLIS 93,126 84,991 8,135
Some of that is the effect of plain old population growth, but it’s still pretty impressive. Note this doesn’t take into account the effect of the suspense files – go here and click on the “I don’t remember seeing my certificate lately. Is that a problem? Don’t I just stay registered?” question for details – but I don’t know how to factor that in, so I’ll just go with this. We’ll have some idea of the turnout effect beginning Monday. In the meantime, make sure you and everyone you know will be voting.
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