Democrats are gathering in Sacramento for their annual convention and one question on delegates’ minds is “what was with those online registrants?” Many credit the online registration for narrow Democratic victories and the 2/3 legislative super-majorities. Senator Leland Yee, who authored the law, is hosting events to highlight the nearly 500,000 new Democratic registrants created by the online system since its implementation.
Several academic studies are currently being conducted on the new online registrations to determine if these were new voters who would have used the paper forms anyways, or a subset of the electorate that is only registered because of the convenience of doing it online. Other studies are looking at the ethnic and socioeconomic breakdowns of the online registrants versus those who register using the traditional system.
For these studies, PDI is the only system in the state that has the information directly from counties on who registered online, and information on the voters ethnicities, voting behavior, distinctions between new registration and re-registrations, and the past election history and socioeconomics of each voter’s neighborhood.
One quick look recently created by PDI explores turnout of online and paper registration compared to the population as a whole. This is further broken into the impact that online and new registration had on turnout for Latinos and younger voters.
As the following chart shows, county by county turnout rates (the gray area on the chart) were consistently beaten by new and online registrations. Statewide turnout was 73% but among new registrants using paper registrations in the last 45 days turnout hit 80%, and for the online registrations in the last 34 days turnout hit 85%.
Young voters in particular had a massive spike among new and online registrations. Despite a lot of press attention on the youth vote, turnout for 18-29 year olds statewide was just 55% in the General. But traditional new registrations were 20 points higher and met or exceeded the statewide average for voters of all ages. Among online-registrants the gap was greatest, with a 25-point bump and average of 80% turnout. This gap was greatest in a set of rural counties, including Fresno, Kings, Kern and others with 30-35% turnout bumps. 
Among Latino voters there was also a significant spike from 12-points for paper registrants to 18-points for online registrations.
The question moving forward will be how these voters participate in the local elections, like the contest for LA Mayor. This will help consultants and candidates judge the potential impact these voters will have on the 2014 Primary and General Election contests.
It is also going to be interesting to see if online registrations becomes the norm. By the close of registration in 2012 over half of all registrations were being done online. This, however, was driven in part by a massive push using social media sites, email, and other online tools. Without a constant drumbeat on Facebook and Twitter will new voters continue to gravitate to this online system?