Voter Registration: CT’s major cities have work to do

With the Republican National Convention in full swing in Minneapolis this week, an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, and news that President Joe Biden has contracted COVID-19, the 2024 Presidential race is high on the minds of voters. All that despite the fact that election day is still four months away.

In Connecticut, voters will next head to the polls on August 13 ^th to choose their preferences for State and District office primaries.

Ahead of election day, the Connecticut Data Project (CTData) has published a heat map of registered voters in the state. According to organizers, the goal is to “assist voter registration and education efforts” with targeted data. They say it can be used to “identify specific neighborhoods in your town with potential unregistered voters, focus your registration drives and get-out-the-vote initiatives for maximum impact, and allocate resources more efficiently to increase civic participation.”

The map was built using U.S. Census data, along with data from the Secretary of the State’s office, which is current to March of this year. While the website maintains that registered voter data is accurate, they admit that population data is drawn from a survey that is prone to error.

Data is represented both in the whole number of estimated unregistered voters, broken down into census blocks, and the percentage of eligible voters who are estimated to be unregistered.

Some of the state’s major cities represent the regions with the most work to do registering voters. Large sections of New Haven are shown to have anywhere from 30% to more than half of eligible residents unregistered with some of the largest sections sitting at between 40-50% unregistered. Waterbury, though it has fewer places where more than half the population is unregistered, still shows a majority of the city at 20% or higher with most regions over 30% unregistered.

Hartford, Bridgeport, and Danbury also show areas of lagging voter registration.

Increasing the percentage of registered voters could have a major impact on this year’s election results, especially in down ballot races which are decided by much smaller margins than national seats. In the 2020 presidential race – which also saw a contentious face off between Trump and Biden – 80% of registered voters in Connecticut showed up at the polls despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, Connecticut voters have even more time to cast their ballots. Voters in the state approved an amendment to the state constitution in 2022 that would allow for early voting. That went into effect this year and will also include the general election on November 5 ^th . Early voting for the general election runs from October 21 ^st to November 3 ^rd .

You can also vote early for August’s primary from August 5 ^th to 11 ^th . If you haven’t registered to vote yet, you can do so online or in person as long as you have a valid state ID or driver’s license.

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