Which states do not record party affiliation on voter registration forms and how does that affect national party registration comparisons?
Executive summary
Roughly one-third of U.S. states and the District of Columbia explicitly collect and publish party affiliation on their voter registration forms, while the remaining states either do not ask for party on the registration form or do not report those totals publicly (counts vary by source) [1] [2] [3]. That mismatch means national “registered Democrat vs. Republican” tallies are incomplete and biassed by geography and the mix of states that collect and report party data [4] [5].
1. What the data actually say — inconsistent counts, consistent problem
Different organizations report different totals because states vary in both whether they collect party on registration forms and whether they publicly publish those counts: Wikipedia and other summaries report that 32 states plus DC allow voters to mark party affiliation [1], Ballotpedia and Ballotpedia News note roughly 31 states publicly release partisan registration figures while other states either do not request affiliations or do not publish totals [3] [2], and analysts at the Brennan Center emphasize a separate categorization of about twenty states that do not track affiliation for administrative reasons tied to how primaries are run [6].
2. Which states do not record party on registration — examples and patterns
There is no single canonical list in the supplied reporting, but multiple sources name examples: prominent states that don’t register voters by party include Texas, Georgia, Washington, and a cluster of industrial Midwestern states such as Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as Virginia, which is often cited as a jurisdiction that registers without reference to party [4]. Ballotpedia and related summaries likewise note that the “remaining states” either do not ask the question or do not publicly report party totals, so absence of statewide published figures is common [3] [2].
3. Why some states don’t collect party affiliation — primaries and administrative design
States that do not track party affiliation often run open or nonpartisan primary systems or treat party choice as a private, election-day decision; the Brennan Center explains that in about fourteen of the non-tracking states primaries are open and therefore registration need not lock a voter into a party, while other states have closed-primary rules that are functionally flexible or impractical to enforce [6]. Federal templates and guidance recognize variation in forms and note that not every state asks for party affiliation on the registration card [7] [8].
4. How that skews national party-registration comparisons
National aggregates that simply sum “registered Democrats vs. Republicans” are intrinsically incomplete because they draw only from the subset of states that record and publish party on registration forms; USAFacts explicitly warns its totals reflect only states that report party-affiliation in their voter files [5]. Sabato’s Crystal Ball spells out the geographic bias: party-registration states are disproportionately in Democratic-leaning regions (Northeast and West), while several large, Republican-leaning states don’t register by party, meaning raw national registration totals can understate Republican registration if one assumes full coverage [4].
5. Measurement workarounds, caveats, and agenda checks
Analysts use several imperfect fixes: restrict comparisons to the set of “party-registration” states (transparent but narrower), estimate partisan affiliation in non-reporting states using primary participation or modeling (used by groups like the Independent Voter Project), or explicitly flag that national totals omit non-recording states [9] [3]. Each approach carries tradeoffs: modeling imports assumptions, restricting reduces national scope, and simple aggregation without caveats risks misleading readers—an implicit agenda often appears when pundits treat incomplete registration counts as definitive evidence of national partisan advantage [4] [2].
6. Bottom line — how to interpret headline registration totals
Treat headline national party-registration numbers as conditional: they describe the partisan composition of the jurisdictions that collect and publish party on registration forms, not the entire electorate [5] [2]. For meaningful comparisons, analysts should either confine their claims to party-registration states, adjust with transparent estimates for non-recording states, or use voter behavior and turnout data (primaries, voter history) rather than raw registration tallies to infer partisan strength [9] [6].