New Data Alert: Pennsylvania
With just days to go until the Oct. 21 deadline, registration rates for 18-year-olds hover below 55% in the swing state
Today we’re sharing data from Pennsylvania – our last update on the state before its October 21st registration deadline.
This is the seventeenth of our 2024 Election Season weekly series of Future Voter Scorecards. Our goal is to help everyone concerned with youth and democracy understand where things stand, what is going right, and what needs improvement on the national, state, and local levels to welcome young people as full participants, starting with registering to vote in high school.
Pennsylvania: By the numbers
As of October 14, just one week before the October 21 registration deadline, only 54.6% of 18-year-olds are registered to vote in Pennsylvania. There are still 71,000 unregistered 18-year-olds across PA, a state where the margin of victory in the 2020 presidential election was just 81,660.
We’re excited to see the state break the 50% mark for the first time this year, but the gap in registration rates between these youngest voters and older voters remains unacceptably high. As a reference, 78% of those 45+ are registered to vote, making for a 23 percentage point gap.
In these last weeks of registration, Pennsylvania’s two largest urban areas have displayed two very different registration trends: Since September 30, Pennsylvania’s statewide rate rose 6.1 percentage points, from 48.50% to 54.6%. Over that period, Greater Philadelphia rose 4.9 ppts (51.5% to 56.4%), but Allegheny County rose 12.6 ppts (54.6% to 67.2%).
As we’ve discussed, this is consistent with Allegheny’s engagement and enthusiasm with high school voter registration drives. In September, our county-wide “Huddle” in Pittsburgh with the Allegheny Youth Vote Coalition attracted 150 high school students to learn how to run nonpartisan voter registration drives in their high schools. Those are running through the October 21 deadline, and we are seeing the results of that hard work in our scorecard. For a detailed case study on the positive impact of high school voter registration drives, please see Brill, et al., Research Report: Increasing Voter Registration Among 18-year-olds in New Hampshire (Feb. 6, 2024).
Pennsylvania does not have same-day voter registration. Anyone not registered on October 21 will not be eligible to vote in the Nov 5th general election.
There’s still time for students and educators to attend a free workshop to learn how to run a drive. Teachers can download a free toolkit to learn how to make a difference in their school communities. But time is running out.
See below for detailed scorecards on 18-year-old registration rates for the most populous counties and for school districts in Allegheny County and greater Philadelphia.