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Near Record Number of Voters Registered In Ohio For 2020 Election

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (Statehouse News Bureau) — There are now more registered voters in Ohio than in the last dozen years, but the total didn’t set a record.

A voter shows her absentee ballot to Franklin County Board of Elections Director Ed Leonard (left) before putting it in the ballot drop box on the last day of weekend early voting before the March 2020 primary.
A voter shows her absentee ballot to Franklin County Board of Elections Director Ed Leonard (left) before putting it in the ballot drop box on the last day of weekend early voting before the March 2020 primary. [Karen Kasler | Statehouse News Bureau]
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.

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

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

That’s a slight drop from the two 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.