About 30 percent of Oregon’s 2.3 million registered voters aren’t allowed to cast a presidential ballot, nor for other partisan races such as governor and secretary of state, during the primary. In contrast, 1,952,684 voters cast ballots in the Republican Primary, 115,762 of whom were previously affiliated with the Democratic Party, representing 5.9 percent of the total Republican vote cast. “Nearly 1.8 million Ohioans chose to join or switch a political party, highlighting the intensity with which Ohioans are engaging this election season”.
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In Ohio, voters do not register with a party, instead they become “affiliated” with a party by voting in its primary.
Democratic Rep. Tom Riner, whose House career began in the early 1980s, has two challengers: former Louisville Metro Council member Attica Scott and Phillip Baker, an insurance agent and civil-rights activist.
But it’s possible many of those crossover voters had changed parties in a prior primary election, making it hard to say definitively how many “true” Republicans or Democrats voted in another party’s primary this year.
Both primaries took place on March 15, yielding victories for Democrat Hillary Clinton and the state’s Republican Gov. John Kasich. “I’m just appalled by the number of people who are for him”. In some cases, voters may decide to choose a ballot for a party that they do not normally support. Three in 10 said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he’s the nominee. In the May 2008 primary, 27 percent of the votes cast came in on Election Day. The criticism varies but generally targets states such as OR where large groups of nonpartisan voters are excluded from the primary, and superdelegates who sometimes don’t have views aligned with their electorate.
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The information being released Wednesday includes county-by-county data on voters’ political affiliations before and after the 2016 primary election.
