Texas now has almost 17.7 million voters — 1.9 million more than four years ago, when Gov. Greg Abbott won re-election.
New voter registration totals from the Texas Division of Elections show the state’s voter rolls are continuing to grow even faster than the population. While the state’s population has grown about 7 percent since 2018, voter registrations have grown about 12 percent.
Nowhere has the surge been bigger than in Harris County, where 230,000 people have been added to the voter rolls since 2018. Tarrant and Bexar counties are next, with more than 130,000 more voters than four years ago. All three counties voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election.
The result is that at least 1 of every 5 voters in Texas never cast a general election ballot in the Lone Star State prior to 2014 — a remarkable wild card in a state that had stable politics and a slow stream of new voters for a generation before that.
Some of the biggest percentage increases in voter registrations are coming from booming counties that voted Republican in 2020.
Comal County, just north of San Antonio, saw a 29 percent increase in voter registrations from four years ago — the highest growth percentage of any county in the state. Not far behind was Kaufman County, east of Dallas, which also grew by about 29 percent.
The surge in voter registration in Texas is partly because of how aggressive candidates and political parties have become in navigating the state’s voter registration system to sign up voters.
Texas has rules that require people registering others to vote to go through training programs to become volunteer deputy voter registrars, and there's a hitch. A registrar must be certified separately in each county in which they register voters. Until 2014, few groups went through that red tape. But since then more liberal-leaning organizations have been signing up far more voters in Houston, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley. That has forced Republican groups also to step up their game in those areas.
Since 2014, Texas has added 3.6 million voters — roughly equivalent to the populations of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
The increase can be traced to 2014, when a group of campaign strategists from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched an effort they called Battleground Texas to build an army of volunteer registrars.
“What we’re going to do is bring the fight to Texas and make it a battleground state so that anybody who wants to be our commander in chief, they have to fight for Texas,” the group’s co-founder, Jeremy Bird, said in a national interview with talk show host Stephen Colbert in 2013.
From 2000 to 2014, Texas voter registrations grew at a glacial pace. The state added just 1 million registered voters — about the same number that the state now adds to the voting rolls every year.
Read more