Thursday New Tools Feature: New Tools, New Time

With voter registration deadlines fast approaching in many states, a final push to register new voters is underway. Most notably, MySpace has partnered with the four largest nonpartisan voter registration groups in the country to launch a voter registration contest, the Ultimate College Bowl.

It works like this: students sign up and are given the embed code for the easy-to-use registration widget, which they then embed in their web sites, myspace pages, or blogs, just like I've done at the bottom of this post. The college that registers the most new voters wins a free concert at their school by Death Cab For Cutie, and the school that registers the largest percentage of their students wins a concert by the Decemberists. The students that personally register the most people can also win scholarships or Guitar Hero 2 (as a recent college graduate, I will admit that I would still be very happy to win any of these prizes).

In general, the use of technology to encourage young people to participate in politics is becoming increasingly prevalent and effective. Though our outdated and inconvenient voting system is set up in a way that discourages young people from voting (a fact which is much more responsible for low youth turnout than our purported "apathy" or "unpredictability"), we can now register in ways that fit our lifestyles - through social networking sites, cell phones, and even videogames (Rock the Vote just came out with a registration form request feature for the Xbox 360).

The results are impressive: the Los Angeles Times reports that Rock the Vote has registered 2.3 million voters this year, more than twice as many people as in 2004. Turnout among those under 30 also increased by 9% from 2000 to 2004, more than twice the increase of any other age group. Technology has had a central role to play in this trend; for example, Rock the Vote reports that "voting rates increase 4% when young people receive a text message reminding them to vote."

The Millennial vote has the power to swing this election. As such, it is incredibly important for the political world to engage them directly. To learn more, read our New Politics Institute paper, Leverage Social Networks, as well as our revealing report about The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation.


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