Always good news, though it’s hard to say anything definitive.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
County elections officials across Texas are reporting a spike in registered voters this election cycle, with one county now exceeding one million registered voters for the first time ever. Earlier this week, Bexar County Elections said they surpassed 1 million registered voters, according to News 4 Television in San Antonio.
That makes Bexar the fourth county in the state with one million or more registered voters. Harris County tops the list at 2 million followed by Dallas and Tarrant.
“Normally we anticipate spikes closer to the elections. We really exceed in September and the first week of October,” said Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole. “But we’re seeing a spike because of different organizations registering voters.”
According to data provided by Pippins-Poole’s office, nearly 113,000 new voters registered in Dallas by the end of July. She noted an uptick in registrations during historically slower times. In February alone her office received 29,922 voter applications, an increase of 186 percent compared to 2012.
Of the county’s eight Republican state representatives, four are vulnerable in a presidential election.
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Heather Evans, an associate professor of political science at Sam Houston State University, suggested Democrats tend to focus on voter registration more than Republicans, which might help explain the uptick in Bexar and Dallas Counties.
“My research over the past four years shows that Democrats are the ones who always talk about/focus on increasing voter registration,” Evans said in an email to Quorum Report.
But two of the fastest growing counties in the country, Tarrant and Fort Bend, have also seen a spike in registration.
I believe that all adult citizens who are not currently under a felony conviction should be allowed to vote, so I’m always glad to see voter registration numbers go up. We would need a lot more information to draw any conclusions about what if anything the numbers might mean. Texas is a growing state, so voter reg numbers should generally increase, though they have often not kept up with the increase in the adult citizen population. Where people live is a huge factor, and for counties of any size that means going down to the precinct level, to see what the ambient proclivities are. It would be nice to know how many of these people are brand new to voting, and how many are new arrivals to the state who have an established history of voting somewhere else. And to the extent that people are being registered as part of an organized effort, it would be nice to know after the fact how many of these people eventually turned out to vote. In general, newly registered voters participate at roughly the same levels as other voters, but that’s in the aggregate. I’m sure some groups are better at this than others; I’d like to know which ones fall into which category. For now, file this away till early voting begins.