Election 2016 may have come and gone. But all those newly registered voters will remain on the books.
Loudoun County saw the biggest increase in new voters in the last five years, a whopping 40 percent increase in Chantilly alone. Stephen Farnsworth at the University of Mary Washington says not just because the population in Loudoun County is rapidly expanding.
“A lot of the new registered voters were actually found in Virginia 10, which is the congressional district that had a lot of competition.”
The other part of the state that saw red-hot new voter registration was Richmond, especially the inner-city, where voter registration increased 38%. Quentin Kidd at Christopher Newport University says that’s because of the hotly contested race for mayor. Former Secretary of the Commonwealth Levar Stoney beat out a host of other candidates, including former Delegate Joe Morrissey.
“By Stoney winning the district that VCU is in, that basically gave him the mayor’s race. And so I think Richmond is explained as much by the mayor’s race and the efforts there as anything else.”
Voter registration didn’t increase everywhere. The southwestern tip of the state saw a decrease in voter registration, especially Lee County, Scott County and Wise County.
You can find more voter registration data here.
