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Some of the ballots returned by mail. ZevWeb photo
As of Thursday afternoon, about 549,000 mail ballots have already been returned to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's office. Somehow they know the party registration of the voters, even though the votes have not yet been counted. Just over a majority, 50.59 percent of the ballots, have come back from Democrats. Some 29.65 percent have come in from Republicans. Nearly 17% have come from “decline to state” and nonpartisan voters.
Those percentages are pretty close to the county's registration as a whole. The breakdown of LA County voter registration from the Registrar-Recorder:
Overall, the number of voters registered — now 4,674,338 in the county, or more than in 42 states — is at a record high. As is the number of voters under age 30: nearly a million. More than one in four LA county voters (27 percent, or 1.2 million) are signed up for permanent mail ballots. They never have to go to a polling place.
From ZevWeb:
Nearly one million of the county’s voters are under 30, and that’s the group that has most enthusiastically embraced online registration, according to figures released this week by the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.
In all, 284,268 people registered to vote or updated their registration information in September or October—and 42% of them did so online, the Registrar-Recorder’s analysis found. Of those, nearly half, or 56,980, were between the ages of 18 and 29. And 74% percent of those taking advantage of the online option were under 40.“For a particular demographic…once it was turned on, they rushed to it,” Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan said. “It was sort of like an ‘if you build it, they will come’ type of scenario.”
Democrats, who make up half of the county’s electorate, were the most avid users of online registration (55.85%), followed by nonpartisans (22.34%) and Republicans (13.8%.) (Traditional, on-paper registration activity during the same September-October period was 57.45% Democratic, 26.37% nonpartisan and 10.83% Republican.)
The Registrar-Recorder also found that Los Angeles County is home to the largest permanent mail-in voting bloc in California, with more than one in four voters now registered to always cast their ballots by mail.
