About 5 percent fewer Chicagoans are registered to vote in next week’s primaries than in the last comparable election.
A total of 1,368,290 voters are registered this year, compared to the 1,444,494 registered in 2010, the last Illinois primary in a non-presidential election year.
That’s a drop of 5.3 percent.
But the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners says that this year’s numbers are “comparable to past non-presidential primaries.”
And the numbers the board supplied pretty much bear that out.
This year’s registration is actually a 5.3 percent increase from 2006, when 1,298,872 voters were registered for that year’s primary.
Chicago election officials note that the 2010 primary came after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama and before a spring voter canvass to get a better read on how many voters were still eligible.
Here are the numbers the board released Monday of voters registered for the March 18 primaries:
2014: 1,368,290
2010: 1,444,494
2006: 1,298,872
2002: 1,377,878
1998: 1,372,810
1994: 1,366,329
