More than 200,000 16 and 17-year-old residents of the state of California are now pre-registered to vote, according to a new report from Secretary of State Alex Padilla.

The effort to pre-register teenagers has been underway since September 2016. In April, Padilla's office announced that 100,000 teens had pre-registered. Less than six months later, that number has doubled.

More than 104,000 of those teens have since turned 18 and will be eligible to vote in midterm elections this November — a fact that Padilla says is "powerful."

"Studies show that if you can get a young voter registered to vote in their first couple elections they're much more likely to be voters for the rest of their life," Padilla told SFGATE. "It's a good time to encourage them to be active citizens. Overall, if you look at who's not registered to vote, it tends to be working class communities, people of color and young people. Young people could represent the largest voting bloc in America if they registered to vote in higher rates. But they don't."

To change that, Padilla and his staff have visited 60 California high schools since he took office in 2015 in an effort to reach teens where they are and to encourage them to get involved. He's also seen to it that in addition to in-person voter pre-registration opportunities, teens can register online.

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"The more (registration is) done digitally, online, the more effective it's going to be," he adds, also noting that they keep active social media accounts on Snapchat and Instagram. "Since we launched online registration, that's when we saw a significant uptick in numbers."

In the Bay Area, the overwhelming majority of young voters registered with no party affiliation or as Democrats. In Alameda County, the county with the largest number of pre-registrations, more teenagers registered as Democrats (4,359) than with no party (4,318). Only 314 teenagers registered as Republicans for 3.3 percent of the total pre-registrations in the county.

In Santa Clara County, the Bay Area county with the second most pre-registrations, more teens registered without a party affiliation (4,827) than as Democrats (3,829). But again, only a small percentage — 5.1 percent — registered as Republican.

Across the state, those statistics are only slightly more balanced. Almost half (47.46 percent) of teens statewide pre-registered with no party preference, but a substantial number of the others (34.44 percent) registered as Democrats. Less than one in ten (9.59 percent) registered Republican.

Padilla believes that the patterns of party affiliation reflect political trends going back at least a decade, but he also suspects that teens may be drawn to liberal politics as a result of the Trump Administration's anti-immigration policies.

"I'd be shocked if that wasn't the case," Padilla says. "Similar to California in the mid-1990s right after Prop 187. Pete Wilson influenced increased civic engagement."

Part of the surge in pre-registrations was also spurred by public response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla. in February 2018. Between March and April, over 11,000 pre-registrations — more than 10 percent of pre-registrations at the time — came in across the state of California.

As the state inches closer to midterm elections in November, though, it remains to be seen if nascent voters will actually turn out. But Padilla's not worried.

"If the energy and enthusiasm in every school I visited is any indicator," he says, "I am absolutely convinced we'll see them at polls in November."

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.

