Personal Democracy Plus Our premium content network. LEARN MORE You are not logged in. LOG IN NOW >

National Voter Registration Day Gearing Up, Online and Offline

BY Miranda Neubauer | Monday, September 24 2012

Over 1,000 organizations have come together to set up an unprecedented online and offline effort on September 25th to do for voter registration what Earth Day did for environmental activism with National Voter Registration Day.

The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance Education Fund, Bus Federation Civic Fund, Fair Elections Legal Network, League of Women Voters, Nonprofit Vote, and Voto Latino worked together to coordinate events, social media outreach and raise awareness about voter registration on that date. Personal Democracy Media is also participating through a partnership with Fight For the Future, which has launched an Internet Votes effort.

"The idea idea is to establish a holiday for people to participate in the democratic process," said Dan McSwain, vice president of digital campaigns for Voto Latino, invoking the Earth Day example. "This is the first time that anything like this has happened on this scale." With some sort of election race happening every year, the hope is that the date becomes an opportunity "to remember every year that registering to vote is essential."

The date at the end of September was selected because it is before state deadlines begin in October. The goal is that participating organizations follow up with people who begin the registration process during the October deadlines to encourage them to complete their registrations. "In 2008, at least six million people didn't register to vote because they didn't realize that their state's deadline had passed," McSwain said.

On-the-ground events are planned in almost all fifty states with participants ranging from advocacy groups to Patagonia, an outdoor camping retailer. In addition to being listed on the website, organizers have also partnered with Tumblr to list events through the social network's Meetups platform.

All participants are being encouraged to promote the effort widely on social media channels and the hashtag #925NVRD.

On the morning of the 25th, a Google Hangout is planned featuring Gabe Saporta, the lead singer of the band Cobra Starship. A Twitter chat featuring Craig Newmark, Rosario Dawson, Good Magazine, the League of Women Voters and the Fem2.0 blogging network is also scheduled.

Mashable reported earlier that Headcount.org, a New York voter-registration organization, was working with over 100 celebrities to promote voter registration messages over social media channels. On its Facebook page, Headcount is already featuring photos of celebrities like Stephen Colbert, 50 Cent and Dave Matthews holding a voter registration clipboard.

High profile supporters like actress Rosario Dawson are also expected to make TV appearances, while organizers are also hoping for exposure in local media outlets.

Turbovote is also officially providing its voter registration service to the effort, McSwain said, and has integrated with those states, like California, that are offering online voter registration.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen tweeted last week that 19,222 people used California's online voter registration application system in its first two days of operation.

The National Association of Secretaries of State voted in the summer to officially declare September 25 National Voter Registration Day.

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

Please Stop Selling MOOCs As a Cure-All for Higher Education

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, promise to provide cheap or free college courses to any student with a Wi-Fi connection, but that's about it. Funny, then, that someone would suggest otherwise. Funnier still, because that someone is Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, in a recent piece that appeared on the Guardian's website. GO

Brazil's Middle Class Protestors Take the Struggle Online, With Mixed Results

Protestors in Brazil have made their war cry heard all over social media and as a result, have received quite a bit of attention from the international community with popular hashtags such as #itsnotabout20cents and #ChangeBrazil. But while they have used tools like Facebook to organize and rally, the effectiveness of their Twitter use is harder to gauge. GO

The Thicker China's "Great Firewall" Becomes, the Subtler the Doors to Sneak Through

As China announces it will tighten restrictions on access to the Internet, Chinese citizens show that they've developed new ways around them. GO

tuesday >

Cory Booker Hires Democratic Organizing Veteran Addisu Demissie To Manage Senate Run

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has hired a veteran of the Democratic organizing world Addisu Demissie to manage his run to succeed the late New Jersey Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. GO

ShareProgress Debuts Social Sharing Optimization Tools

ShareProgress, a left-leaning tech startup in downtown San Francisco, launched its social sharing optimization platform Tuesday after several months of testing with the progressive advocacy group CREDO Action. GO

New Organizing Institute to Move from Collecting Election Data to Organizing Election Officials

The New Organizing Institute, a progressive nonprofit that trains campaigners and is no led by former Obama for America data director Ethan Roeder, is launching a new initiative next week aiming to "fix that" for local elections. NOI will announce a national network where local election administration officials can congregate to share solutions to common issues. It's a transition for a team at NOI that had previously been managing the Voting Information Project, which collects data on polling places, election districts and voter registration deadlines and prepares it for third parties in machine-readable format. In the 2012 election cycle, backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and partnered with Google, VIP made information available in all 50 states. GO

Russian SOPA Passed First Reading

A first draft of a law nicknamed “Russian SOPA” was approved by the Russian parliament last Friday, June 14. Like the original Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill will establish penalties and procedures for online copyright violations.

GO

monday >

Czech Prime Minister Resigns Following Corruption and Surveillance Scandal

The prime minister of the Czech Republic resigned yesterday, irreparably damaged by a corruption scandal and the possibility of impropriety in his personal life. According to the Czech constitution, his entire government will also have to relinquish office.

GO

friday >

Mayors of New York City and San Francisco Announce "Digital Cities" Summit

The Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced Friday that they're co-hosting meetings in the Fall and early next year to examine the "best practices" that lead to tech-enabled economic growth. The meetings are follow-ups to the initial Bloomberg Technology Summit held last year in New York City. This year's summit in New York ... GO

New York State Joins GitHub to Get Feedback on Open Data Policy

New York is the first state to publish an initial draft of its open data guidelines on GitHub to seek feedback from the public, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in a press release Thursday. GO

Brazilians Protest Forced Evictions on YouTube and in Mock World Cup

Tomorrow Brazilians who have been forced out of their housing in advance of the 2014 World Cup will stage their own “People's Cup” in Rio de Janeiro to draw awareness to forced evictions.

GO

A “Fix-Rate” for Corruption: Integrity Action Wins the Google Global Impact Award

“From wanachi (“citizen”) to up there,” Emmanuel Dzombo explains with an upward sweep of his hand, is how Integrity Action has begun to reverse the bureaucratic top-down approach that has often blocked development work in Kenya. Dzombo is a local leader in Chengoni, Kenya, a country that ranks towards the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index – at 139. The organization believes it could do more, and Google.org seems to agree. The Google Impact Challenge will provide the charity with £500,000 that will allow it to develop a mobile application for tracking and collecting data from citizens. GO

Crowdsourced "Danger Maps" Track Air, Soil and Water Pollution in China

Chinese citizens are exposing sources of pollution and other environmental problems by contributing to the partially crowdsourced website 'Danger Maps'. So far, the Chinese government is letting them get away with it.

GO

thursday >

U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board To Meet Next Wednesday

A long dormant independent agency that was at least nominally supposed to exercise a modicum of oversight over the booming intelligence-industrial complex is scrambling to meet up next Wednesday, but the public will still be none the wiser about what it plans to do, since it is a closed door meeting. The only indication that the toothless ... GO

Despite Software Problems, Civic Hackers are Pedaling Bike Share Data

Reporters are shoaling around the news that New York City's new bike sharing system, Citi Bike, is benighted with problems stemming from its high-tech software. But that's not putting the brakes on plans to explore what programmers might do with data generated by the system by hosting a Citi Bike Civic Hack Night later this month. GO

Grassroots Republicans Are Not Waiting for the RNC To Revamp Their Digital Strategy

Several members of the Republican Party rank and file aren't waiting around for the GOP to reinvent itself on the technological front. They're organizing events themselves to explore what a tech-enabled GOP might look like for the 2014 cycle. GO

More