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Near-Record Ohio Voters Registered For 2020 Election

More than 500 people queued up in Franklin County for the start of early voting on Oct. 6.
Nick Evans
/
WOSU
More than 500 people queued up on October 6 morning in Franklin County as early voting began.

There are now more registered voters in Ohio than in the last dozen years, but the total didn’t set a record.

There are 8,073,417 registered voters in Ohio as of the close of voter registration a week ago, a higher total than in any year since the record of more than 8.2 million in 2008.

Over 4.5 million voters are unaffiliated, meaning they haven’t cast a partisan ballot in a primary in three years.

More than 1.9 million voters are affiliated with the Republican Party, and nearly 1.6 million are with the Democrats.

That’s a slight drop from the 2 million who were affiliated with the Republican Party after the primary in 2018, and a gain of half a million from the 1.1 million who were affiliated with the Democratic Party in 2016.

Democrats have been flooding boards of elections with absentee ballot requests, sometimes more than the total number of absentee ballots that were mailed back in all of 2016. Early voting also began last week, and continues for the next few weeks until November 2.

Republicans have said they're planning to cast ballots in person, which a recent Quinnipiac poll shows 51% of likely voters said they'll do.