Star’s plea to lift voter registrations

In a surprise Instagram post on Monday, music megastar Taylor Swift broke her long silence on politics and encouraged her more than 112 million followers on the platform to register to vote.

It seems as though some of them rushed to do just that, according to Vote.org, a non-partisan group that seeks to increase voter turnout.

As of noon yesterday, more than 169,000 new people had registered on the site to vote, spokeswoman Kamari Guthrie said.

That put the number of new voters registered on the site in October, to date, at 240,329. By comparison, the group said 56,669 new voters registered in August and 190,178 registered in September. In October 2016, there were 405,149 new registrations on Vote.org for the whole month.

Guthrie said it was difficult to credit Swift directly for the spike in registrations because there was usually some kind of a surge just before voter registration deadlines, in election years, since ‘‘people wait until the deadline to register.’’ (As is the case in many states, yesterday was the deadline to register to vote in Tennessee in time for the November 6 election.)

However, among the 169,000 new registrations since Monday, more than half were by those ages 18 to 29.

‘‘One thing is clear, we’re seeing a massive surge in the 18-24 and 25-29