Counties Kept Busy w/ Surge of Online Voter Registrations; Numbers Spell Trouble for GOP?

Online voter registration has been a roaring success in the state of California thanks to a new law that made the transition possible. In fact, in the first three weeks that online registration has been available, over 400,000 Californians have made use of the new and convenient feature. Many counties are seeing new registrations at a record-setting pace. Young voters in particular are far more used to completing things online and 28 percent of those who have registered online are young. For the sake of comparison, that is seven times higher than the percentage of people over 65 who registered online.  Online registration is also expected to cut costs for counties and increase efficiency.

However, many Republicans were opposed to the bill that created online registering, as perhaps they expected it would lead to their numbers slipping below 30 percent, and that trend certainly seems to be the case. After all, the AP reports: “The early registration trend under the new law suggests rough times ahead for the California Republican Party. Information gathered by Political Data from 31 of California’s 58 counties showed Democrats accounting for 49 percent of online registrations, compared to 19 percent for Republicans.”

For example, take Riverside County. Nearly 9,000 people have submitted online applications to vote in the county and of those voters, 48 percent registered as Democrats. The county has a majority of registered voters who are Republicans but the party appears to be losing ground if the online registrations are to be believed.

An early sampling of online registrants indicated that they were 2 1/2 times more likely to register as Democrats than Republicans and a third were younger than 26. See more here.