‘No Party Preference’ registration up in CA

Sept. 24, 2012

Katy Grimes: According to the Secretary of State’s office, voter registration in California is up, since the 2008 election. Of the 23,780,847 eligible California voters, 17,259,680 are registered to vote — 72.58 percent of eligible voters.

But it’s not as high of a percentage of voters as 1996, when 77.27 percent of eligible California voters were registered.

Most interesting is the party breakdown:

Democrat: 43.3 percent

Republican: 30.1 percent

Other: 5.3 percent

No Party Preference: 21.3 percent

The Secretary of State reports that since the last 60-Day Report of Registration in a presidential general election year (September 5, 2008):

* The total voter registration in the state increased from 16,171,772 to 17,259,680.

* The percentage of the total number of registered voters compared to the number of people who are eligible to register to vote increased from 69.8 percent to 72.6 percent.

* The percentage of voters who have no party preference increased from 19.5 percent to 21.3 percent.

*The percentage of people registered with a qualified political party decreased from 79.8 percent to  77.5 percent.

* The percentage of voters registered with the Democratic Party decreased from 43.9 percent to 43.3 percent.

* The percentage of voters registered with the Republican Party decreased from 32.3 percent to 30.1 percent.

No party preference

The growing ‘no party preference’ voters is evidence of a disgusted and frustrated electorate. However, because the group is so large, they can greatly impact the outcome of this election, particularly on the ballot initiatives.

Most interesting however, was the statistic showing that San Francisco County has the highest number of ‘No Party Preference’ voters at 30.98 percent. We’ll see what that means on November 7.