Political Notebook: What are Maryland's voter registration, turnout numbers?

What are Maryland's voter registration, turnout numbers?

(Editor’s note: This reporting took place prior to President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection. In a letter to the American people on Sunday, Biden said: “while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”)

Ultimately in the United States, it is the voters (through the Electoral College system), which pick the president.

Voter registration numbers can show towards which political party that a state or a county may be leaning, based on the trend. With only three days in the month after the much-discussed first presidential debate on June 27, the effect on a 90-minute performance on voter registration in Maryland is unclear.

What is clear is new voter registrations in June were way up from the totals in May, the month of the primary.

33,685 people registered to vote in June, according to a report from the Maryland State Board of Elections, compared to a little more than 5,000 individuals during the month of May, when voter registration was closed in the weeks leading up to the May 14 primary election.

Of the approximately new 33,000 registrations statewide, a little more than 14,000 registered as Democrats, 6,824 registered as Republicans, and 11,554 registered as unaffiliated in June.

In Washington County, 170 individuals registered as Democrats, 114 individuals registered as Republicans, and 119 registered as unaffiliated during the month of June.

At the end of June, in Washington County, there were 44,115 registered Republicans (a slight decrease from the total the month prior). The county had 30,423 registered Democrats, (also a slight decrease from the total the month prior), and 23,554 registered unaffiliated voters (again, slight decrease from the total the month prior).

This brought the county’s registered voters under 100,000 for the first time this year. The main reason for the drop off in registrations was more mundane than the debate or the national political climate.

“We sent 85,000 sample ballots and so we got a lot of those returned to us,” said Barry Jackson, election director at the Washington County Board of Elections, in a July 16 interview in his office, “and so then (those registered voters) all got put into inactive status.”

Each registered voter on the inactive list is sent a confirmation card, he said, which enables them to respond to keep their registration current. The process keeps the county’s registration rolls “clean,” Jackson said. A similar process played out in county election boards across the state.

At the end of June, 4,175,305 individuals were registered to vote in the state in total, about 20,000 less than had been registered to vote at the end of the previous month.

As for the state, in June 2024, there were 997,311 registered Republicans, according to the state board’s website. In May, there were more than 1,000,000 registered Republicans statewide .

There were more than twice as many registered Democrats statewide, according to the June report. 2,214,915 Democrats were registered, an approximately 14,000-person drop off from the primary month. 902,407 people registered as unaffiliated, about 5,000 total less than in May.

Hagerstown Braves top performers:Here are the Hagerstown Braves' top performers entering the South Penn League playoffs

Downtown ambassadors sought:Downtown Hagerstown Main Street seeks ambassadors to assist event attendees

So while new voter registrations rose statewide in June as compared to May, total voter registrations in Maryland did not. Those trends mirror those seen in Washington County.

In a year where President Joe Biden has said “our very democracy” is “at risk,” another statistic did not rise in Maryland’s presidential primary: turnout. In Washington County, less than a quarter of eligible voters exercised their right to vote this year. In the primary four years ago, that number was 36 percent.

Statewide, less than 28 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the primary this year, including 31 percent of registered Democrats and 29 percent of registered Republicans. When Biden carried the state in the 2020 primary with the vast majority of the vote, total turnout? 42 percent.

---Dwight A. Weingarten