Burnt Orange Report

San Antonio Voter Reg. Way Up

By Byron LaMasters

From the broken record department, Kuff crunches the numbers via Lasso:

More than 62,000 Bexar County residents have registered to vote since January, boosting the number of local eligible voters to a record level of almost 900,000 and causing officials to brace for the upcoming presidential election.

If only half of all those who are registered to vote actually show up at the polls Nov. 2, it would be the largest voter turnout in Bexar history, officials said Tuesday.

[...]

According to election records, there were 896,913 registered voters in Bexar County as of Tuesday afternoon — about 25,000 more than the 2000 presidential election.

[...]

The north and northeast parts of the county set the pace for new registered voters this year with 22,819.

Certainly good news for democracy, although I'd be inclined to second-guess Kuff's assertion that this is great news for Democrats:

Idealistic concerns for democracy aside, there's a big reason to be happy about this. I've been going through election return data, and in just about every election I've checked, going back to 1996 so far, the Democrats do better in the four major urban counties (Bexar, Dallas, Harris, and Travis) than they do statewide.

Any and all voter registration is a good thing, but just because the urban counties show an increase in voter registration, doesn't necessarily mean it's likely to swing Democratic. Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Travis Counties all have large swaths of favorable turf for Democrats, but the same is true for Republicans. I tended to regard the Travis County voter registration news as great for Democrats, because it was disproportionately among young people. In Bexar County, the article mentions that the highest voter registration is in the north and northeast sections of the county - also the most Republican and suburban areas of the county.