Onondaga County residents not registered to vote have four weeks to sign up if they want to cast a ballot in the upcoming election. The board of elections is working through a backlog of 20,000 registration forms as others continue to come in, via mail but mostly electronically. Democratic Commissioner Dustin Czarny says not all of the registrations are from new voters.
“A lot of them are changing addresses, changing parties, that kind of thing," Czarny said. "In previous years in presidential years, we've added anywhere from 12 to 15,000 voters at this point, we've only added about 5,000 voters. If those previous year's trends continue, we could add up to maybe get around 320,000 active registered voters by the end.”
That would be a record, surpassing the current 312,000. Czarny says a number of factors spurred registration, mainly the switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket for president. He says the party conventions, National Voter Registration Day and even Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris also boosted interest.
“Up until July, it was pretty dead on the Democrat and Republican side, while the non-enrolled were pretty high," Czarny said. "So the partisan enrollment have started to pick up. And of course the Democrat enrollment has really picked up since and we've seen a lot of people switching parties as well.”
Czarny says they don’t yet have the breakdown on who’s switching to what party. They do know that so far, 38 percent of new registered voters are unaffiliated, 35 percent are Democrat, and 21 percent Republican. The remaining six percent are broken up among minor parties. Registration forms are due before October 26th -- the first day of early voting – which is ten days before election day. More information can be found here.
