Fewer Republicans in Pasco County This Year?

There are about 600 fewer registered Republicans in Pasco County this year compared to last, though GOP voters outnumber Democrats by almost 10,000 leading up to this month's Florida Republican primary.

The Pasco County Supervisor of Elections office unofficially closed the books Tuesday on voter registration for the 2012 primary, with 115,778 voters having filed as Republicans, records show. That's down from 116,378 Pasco Republicans in 2010.

Only registered members of the Republican Party are eligible to vote in the Jan. 31 primary.

There are also now more than 105,000 registered Democrats in Pasco and about 75,000 "others." The totals still need to be verified by the state.

Pasco Supervisor of Elections Brian E. Corley said things have been "chaotic" around his office in the past two months leading up to the Jan. 3 registration deadline. In the month of December alone, 3,287 new voters registered in Pasco — more than 1,100 of those as Republicans. An additional 400 voters changed their party affiliation to Republican.

All those filings make for a busy time of year for elections officials, even though the primary itself isn't for another three weeks.

"The analogy is we're a lot like NASA," Corley said. "We do a lot in between when the rockets go up."

Pasco Voting History

In Florida's last GOP primary in 2008, 39 percent of Pasco's 107,010 registered Republicans turned out at the polls. John McCain won the Pasco vote, edging Mitt Romney by about 3,500 votes and taking Florida and the GOP nomination before falling to Barack Obama in the general election.

A decade earlier, in 1998, there were 88,157 registered Democrats and 88,016 Republicans in Pasco County — the last time Democrat voters were in the majority here. Since then, the gap has increased, holding steady at around 10,000 more Republicans than Democrats in recent years.

Pasco has added nearly 90,000 registered voters in that time.

More Information

To view a sample ballot for the Republican primary, find a polling location or to check your registration status, visit the Pasco Supervisor of Elections website.