Voter registration is already up in Connecticut ahead of this year’s presidential election.
Tuesday is National Voter Registration Day to raise awareness about voting and making sure you’re registered to vote. Connecticut officials say voter registration was increasing even before.
“Voter registration increased again this year; it's been increasing steadily since 2016. We have 2.2 million voters now. That is literally an all-time-high,” Secretary of the State Denise Merrill said.
Merrill said she was afraid registration might drop off because the Department of Motor Vehicles was closed for a period of time and license renewal dates were postponed by the governor, but that’s not the case.
“I’m frankly pleasantly surprised that people are still registering in large numbers,” Merrill said.
Most people are registering to vote online.
The easiest way is to go onto the Secretary of the State’s website, portal.ct.gov/sots and right there it says 'how do I register to vote,' and you click it on and you start filling out the information as if you were filling out a registration card," Sue Larsen said.
Larsen, the registrar of voters in South Windsor said most voter registration happens online.
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“There’s also voter registration through DMV so when you’re renewing your license you can fill out the information for registering to vote and they also let us know if you’ve moved from one location to another,” Larsen said.
This is the first year any voter will be able to vote by absentee ballot so there’s a lot of media attention on the issue. That ends up being a good thing for voter registration.
“People are calling up and saying, ‘I didn’t get an absentee ballot application how come?’ And so we’re looking them up and we’re finding out they’re either not registered or they were inactive registrars and just needed to be reactivated,” Larsen said.
She hopes voters are paying attention and will make sure they’re registered before November.
“Please don’t wait until the last day to register to vote. Go out and make sure you’re registered to vote before the cutoff day which is seven days before the election,” Larsen added.
