In 2006, Matt Stoller presented Working Assets with a detailed critique of online voter registration system we had developed for the 2006 election. A year later, we are ready to roll out what we expect to be a game-changing web tool for the 2008 election as a direct response to the challenge Stoller laid out.
This new generation voter registration tool is being developed by Working Assets and deployed in partnership with Rock the Vote.
Working Assets, Rock the Vote, and other groups have been using the web to help people complete voter registration forms for several years. But our methods were centralized, top-down and to a large part didn't harness the power of the netroots or bottom up campaigns. Our new tool is an advancement over previous versions for several reasons - thanks to Stoller for helping us conceive of these improvements and to Zack Exley for helping us understand how to execute them. In a nutshell, we're making it as easy to register voters on your blog or web site as it is to post a YouTube video. And we're providing easy-to-use tools to measure your progress and get in touch with your newly registered voters.
Over the next month or so, we'll be rolling out the full functionality of our voter registration widget - a portable application that anyone can embed in virtually any webpage, allowing users to complete a voter registration application for their state that they can open as a PDF, print, sign, and mail in. (Check out a live version at rockthevote.com; just click `Register to Vote' on the splash page.) Folks hosting the widget on their sites have administrative rights for their campaign, meaning they can view and display counts of their registrations and even download the data for people they've registered.
The advances are significant. First, users never have to go to a foreign site to complete the registration process. The application lives fully inside the site it's embedded in. Second, allowing users to make their counts public will let different individuals and groups take credit for their work and even encourage some healthy competition. Finally, giving widget hosts full control over their data is a powerful incentive to use the tool for list building.
If you care about what happens on November 4, 2008 (or November 6, 2007 for that matter), you're probably wondering where to get the code. The full administrative interface where you can sign up and grab the widget on your own will be up by September 1. If you want to be updated on the status of the program, or have an urgent need to be signed up before then, drop me an email at aklaus@workingassets.com.
If you're curious about more of the back story, read on after the jump.
You may know Working Assets as your mobile phone, long distance, or credit card provider. You may also know us as a funder of many progressive organizations ($50 million and counting in donations over the last 20 years). In addition to that, we've become increasingly operationally involved in the civic engagement sector in the last few years.
In 2003, we set a goal of registering a million new voters by the 2004 election. To reach the goal, it became apparent that we were going to have to find a very high-volume channel, and the most obvious place to turn was the internet.
In conjunction with Rock the Vote, we developed a web application that streamlined the Election Assistance Commission's National Voter Registration Application (a 25-page packet) into a series of webforms that delivered the correct state-specific instructions to and collected the appropriate information from users. It created a completed PDF of the registration application, which the user could sign and submit to their state using a pre-addressed mailer sheet.
We met the goal in 2004, and between Working Assets and Rock the Vote, we've generated over 2.1 million online registration applications to date. Matching those data to voter files shows that over 70% of the applicants who complete the online process end up on the rolls - huge, considering the unavoidable process hurdles imposed by the postal mail-based system. Additionally, over 80% of the registrants end up voting. The numbers vary based on age, among other factors, but we know that anywhere from 54-63% of the online list actually turn out. Clearly, registering folks online is a great way to build a list of high-turnout propensity voters.
Our improvements in 2007 are poised to carry us into the largest voter registration campaign ever, possibly by a factor of two or three, leading up to 2008. Stoller's idea for widgetization will help to make this a truly distributed campaign that aggregates the efforts of hundreds or thousands of smaller, personalized campaigns driven by the netroots. It turns the tables on older, top-down, centralized models of organizing. And we're ok with that.
Add to the mix Zack Exley's idea to build the underlying engine with an open API - thereby enabling folks with some development resources to creatively integrate voter registration into other applications - and we've got a very Web 2.0 approach to this aspect of online organizing.
The end result looks like this: a central engine capable of processing huge volumes of registration applications; an API that opens up access to the necessary functions of voter registration; and a widget application that anyone can grab, host, and have access to an administrative site where they can get counts and even download the data for the list of registrants they build.
Online voter registration is not meant to replace field registration programs, an area in which Working Assets is also involved. But it does give us a much cheaper alternative for the people we can reach on the web: historically, we've been able to collect applications online for about $1 a piece, compared for about $13 for an efficient and scalable field program. The more people we can register online, the more we can spend on even more impactful work, like issue education and GOTV.
Are you in? Again, contact me at aklaus@workingassets.com and we'll keep you posted as we roll this out through the end of the summer.
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