AUSTIN (KXAN) — Since the primary elections back in March, almost half a million Texans statewide have registered to vote, according to data from the Texas Secretary of State’s office.

Between March and Oct. 11, a total of 488,147 Texans registered to vote, an increase of 2.8%.

As of Oct. 11, the deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 8 midterm elections, 17,672,143 Texans were registered statewide. That’s a new record high for any election — midterm or otherwise.

The almost 17.7 million total is more than 715,000 higher than in the 2020 presidential election.

Texas does not require voters to register with a particular political party, so the Secretary of State’s office does not have any specific data related to party affiliation.

Instead, KXAN looked at the winner of each county in the past two presidential elections to see who won in places with higher new registration totals.

In the 224 counties that Donald Trump won in both elections, about 221,000 people registered to vote since March. That’s a little higher than the 206,000 new voters in the 19 counties that were won by both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Eight counties flipped from Clinton to Trump between 2016 and 2020, in which 1,215 people are newly registered. Meanwhile, there are almost 60,000 new voters in the three counties that flipped from Trump to Biden.

The table below shows how voter registration totals have changed in each county statewide since the March primaries. Hays County has the second largest increase — 6.1% — or 9,598 new voters registered since March. The county now has more than 167,000 registered voters.

Loving County, the smallest county in the state in terms of population, has just 109 registered voters, up from 97 in the March primaries, an increase of 12.4% — the largest of any county statewide.

In terms of raw numbers, Harris County added the most registered voters, with more than 60,000 new residents added to the county’s voter rolls. Bexar, Tarrant and Dallas counties all added more than 30,000 registered voters, while Travis, Denton and Collin each added more than 20,000.

Thirty counties statewide saw a decrease in the number of registered voters since March. Coke County, north of San Angelo, had the highest drop, with 103 fewer registered voters. That’s a decrease of 4.3%.

Voter registration in Central Texas

In the 15 counties that make up the KXAN viewing area, a total of 60,762 people registered to vote between March and Oct. 11.

Almost half of those, 28,752, are in Travis County, while a quarter, 15,317, are in Williamson County. About 9,500 newly-registered voters live in Hays County. Bastrop and Burnet counties also added more than 1,000 new voters to their rolls.

The number of registered voters in Hays County increased by 6.1%, the greatest change of any local county, while registration in Bastrop and Blanco counties increased by more than 4%.

Mason County added the fewest number of new voters, with 54 in total. Fayette County saw the smallest percentage increase in new voters, at 1.5%.