March 31, 2016
Around 56,000 people in a single day registered online to vote in Pennsylvania's upcoming primary, county election officials told Newsworks.
The crush of new registrations came on Monday, the eligibility deadline to vote in the April 26 primary. Altogether, more than 200,000 people filed voter applications in the five weeks before Monday's deadline, reported 90.5 WESA.
Philadelphia also saw a great deal of party-switching, in all directions. 4,651 people changed their affiliation to the Democratic party, 3,451 switched to the Republican party and 1,037 people changed to another party or registered as independents.
"By far, the largest number of party affiliation switches in Philadelphia so far this year are from 1) "Other parties" (Third parties, independents, non-affiliated, and other non-GOP parties) to Democratic; and 2) Democratic to Republican," wrote City Commissioner Al Schmidt on Facebook.
He published several graphs to illustrate the trends. The largest number of Democrat-to-Republican switches occurred in South Philadelphia and the far Northeast. The most other-party-to-Democratic switches occurred in Manayunk/Roxborough and Center City.
"We will still have thousands of voter registration applications yet to process in the days ahead, so these numbers are a snapshot in time, not the final numbers," Schmidt cautioned.
See the full story here.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that 200,000 people had registered since August. That was the number of people who had registered in five weeks before the deadline.
