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New York’s Curious “New Year’s Baby Boom”: What’s Really Behind the January 1 Birthdate Spike in the Voter Rolls?

Author: by Kim Hermance, President and Co-founder, Project CIVICA and John Savino, Project CIVICA Voter Roll Data Research Analyst

If you take a closer look at New York State’s voter registration data, one detail jumps off the page: an unusually high number of voters share the same birthday—January 1. At first glance, it might seem like a fun coincidence or a quirky data fluke. But when you line up the numbers, the pattern becomes hard to ignore. January 1 birthdays show up nearly twice as often as the first day of any other month. When plotted across the entire calendar year, that single day produces a spike so dramatic in this rough bar graph, it overshoots the page.

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