ELECTION 2025: There’s still time to register to vote

Luzerne County has picked up 1,911 voters this year to date, and residents still have a little over a week to register for the Nov. 4 general election.

The registration deadline is Oct. 20.

Applications can be submitted online or dropped off at the election bureau.

They are available at pavoterservices.pa.gov, which allows immediate submission or printing of the application so it can be dropped off at the election bureau.

Applications can also be filled out in person at the county election bureau on the second floor of the Penn Place Building, 20 N. Pennsylvania Ave., Wilkes-Barre.

To register for the upcoming election in Pennsylvania, applicants must be at least 18 years old on Election Day and have been a U.S. citizen and a resident of the state and applicable election district for at least 30 days before the election, the application says.

Applicants must provide their state driver’s license or PennDOT ID card number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

State Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt has urged eligible residents to consider the online registration option, saying it is fast and convenient.

Cook said election workers have been staying late processing registration applications.

“We are all caught up,” she said last week.

At this time a year ago, the bureau was swamped with thousands of new voter registration applications because it was a presidential election year, including some duplicate applications from voters already registered.

To ensure all is in order, voters can verify their registration information through the state’s database at pavoterservices.pa.gov.

With last year’s presidential registration stampede, the county voter count had swelled to 209,718.

However, a subsequent mandatory purge of thousands of inactive voters reduced the county’s total voter registration to 203,027 at the start of this year.

The total county registration is 204,938, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State’s latest update dated Oct. 6.

Party affiliation

The current county registration affiliation totals in the latest state report: Republicans, 91,020; Democrats, 84,080; and no affiliations or other affiliations, 29,838.

Comparing these figures to the start of the year, Democrats lost 756 voters, while the gains were 1,128 for Republicans and 1,539 for no/other affiliations.

Prior county councilman Rick Williams said he is not surprised the greatest 2025 growth was among those not registered to either major party. Williams was the only registered Independent elected to council since the 2012 implementation of home rule.

“It reflects the dissatisfaction many people have with the political system, that it’s not working very well,” Williams said.

Williams, who now resides in Seattle, cited state and federal budget impasses and Republican and Democratic legislators “not working together to solve the problems.”

“They’re not negotiating or compromising. It’s very frustrating and doesn’t surprise me that people no longer want to be affiliated with political parties,” Williams said.

The county’s voter registration had officially flipped from a Democratic to a Republican majority in mid-September last year, prompting headlines and social media victory declarations from the party.

As regularly reported, the gap between Democrats and Republicans had been steadily shrinking for years, and county Republican leaders had long predicted the eventual switch from a blue to red domination.

At the time of the initial conversion last year, the parties were separated by 83 voters (87,415 Republicans and 87,332 Democrats), according to past reporting.

That gap is now 6,940 based on the latest state figures.

Big picture

For perspective on where Luzerne County stands at the statewide level, its registration ranks thirteenth among the 67 counties, according to the state’s Oct. 6 statistics.

Philadelphia is at the top, with 1.069 million registered voters, followed by Allegheny County, which has 912,104.

The other counties with higher counts: Montgomery (617,016), Bucks (480,854), Delaware (408,636), Chester (384,600), Lancaster (359,599), York (322,343), Berks (270,699), Lehigh (250,992), Westmoreland (250,596), and Northampton (228,854).

Age breakdown

The state’s Oct. 6 voter registration report also provides age category breakdowns for the county voters registered:

• 18 to 24: 16,330

• 25 to 34: 30,214

• 35 to 44: 32,333

• 45 to 54: 30,711

• 55 to 64: 35,954

• 65 to 74: 32,875

• 75+: 26,520