OLYMPIA — A record number of voters are registered in Washington state leading up to the November election.
State election officials said Tuesday that 3,515,393 people are registered to vote, about 1,300 more than the record set in 2004, which was later scaled back after the state removed invalid registrations from its database.
Secretary of State Sam Reed said the numbers show that people are excited about the presidential election and the close governor’s race.
“This is a pretty exciting and dynamic election year,” he said.
Reed said there are more than 280,000 new voters this year, and that doesn’t include a last-minute surge leading up to the Oct. 4 preliminary registration deadline. Of the state’s 6.6 million people, about 75 percent of those who are eligible to vote are registered. About 1.2 million voting-age, eligible people are not registered.
The number of registered voters is expected to climb even more over the next few weeks, since tens of thousands of new registration applications are still being processed, he said.
Voters can still register in person until Oct. 20. Election Day is Nov. 4. Ballots have been sent out to military and overseas voters, and the rest of the ballots are set to go out Oct. 17.
State elections director Nick Handy said that last week alone, more than 35,000 people registered online. Another 10,000 paper registrations arrived Monday.
Handy said state workers expected a lot of voter interest, but the numbers have “surpassed our expectations.”
“We have more registered voters in the state of Washington today than we’ve ever had in our history,” he said.
Handy said he thinks the ability to register online, which took effect this year, had a big effect.
“Who knows how many would have printed out a form and the form would have sat on a dining room table for weeks?” he said. “Online registration really connects, particularly with the younger voters.”
The new online registration law allows voters to fill out an application on the secretary of state’s Web site. The applications are sent daily in electronic form to county elections offices.
Only people with a Washington state driver’s license or state ID can register online.
The new statewide voter registration database that has been online since 2006 is connected to the state Department of Licensing, which has people’s signatures and photos on file.
That same database, which consolidated the 39 separate county systems into one, is also what has cut down on invalid registrations.
Since 2006, more than 450,000 voter registrations were canceled. Of those, nearly 95,000 were ineligible felons or people who had died, and almost 55,000 were canceled because they duplicated registrations. The rest were people who moved out of state, asked to be removed, or had not voted in the years covering two federal general elections.
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