Maryland election officials have processed nearly 20,000 voter registration applications this week alone and said thousands more are pouring in as voters who want to participate in next month’s historic election scramble to meet Tuesday’s deadline.
The state has processed 54,000 applications from new voters since last month and more than 200,000 since the registration deadline for this year’s primary elections, according to officials at the Maryland Board of Elections. Staff said they are “swamped” but prepared to process as many as 50,000 more through the week ahead.
“It’s killing us, but we love it,” Stacey Johnson, a deputy administrator, said Friday.
In Maryland, the new voters are largely young Democrats, a pattern election experts said is not new but is proportionately higher this year compared to previous elections. New voters in Maryland who are 18 and 19 years old will make up 27.5 percent of all registrants this year, compared with an average of 11 percent in the previous four presidential election years, experts said.
The influx of new Democratic voters may not affect the outcome of the presidential election in Maryland, but could impact ballot questions — namely, a constitutional amendment to allow slot machines at five locations across the state, officials said.
But will these last-minute registrants show up to the polls Nov. 4? Donald Norris, professor and chairman of the Department of Public Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, said that remains to be seen.
“The conventional wisdom about voter registration is that there is a direct correlation between age and turn-out and socioeconomic status —mainly education and income — and turn-out,” Norris said. “The older people turn out more proportionately than young people, and well-educated and well-off people turnout more than the opposite.”
State election officials still expect to process fewer new voters than during the 2004 presidential election, when turnout nationwide was the highest since 1960 thanks to a huge surge in young voters.
Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate at American University, said he predicts young voters will turn out in numbers similar to — but not greater — than in 2004. But a push from presidential candidate Barrack Obama to register African Americans could sway statistics, he said.
“The only area I expect an increase in turn-out for sure is among African-Americans,” Gans said.
