As TurboVote has grown in leaps and bounds, the team has received some great feedback from our supporters and sponsors.  Check out what people are saying and let us know what you think of TurboVote on Twitter @TurboVote
“TCC encourages students to participate in the political process and have their voices heard at the polls. I am very supportive of our partnership with TurboVote because it makes the voting process much easier for our students and it will impact students’ awareness and participation.”
Jim Murdaugh- Tallahassee Community College President
“Over the years Eastern Michigan University’s Student Government has invested thousands in man hours, advertising and costly volunteer efforts to offer what Turbovote makes accessible in just  a couple of keystrokes.”
“We are confident that our participation in Turbovote will ensure that every student at EMU will have the tools necessary to vote in every election”.
Matthew Norfleet- Eastern Michigan University Student Body President
“With everything going on in Detroit right now, students need to have a voice”
“TurboVote helps amplify our voice in Lansing and DC by helping more students vote in more of their elections”
Adham Aljahmi- Government Chair of the Wayne State University Senate
“Social change comes from civic engagement, which starts with voting”
“Marygrove produces leaders seeking to effect social change.  For this reason, Marygrove is pleased to partner with TurboVote to enhance our students’ civic engagement in the electoral process.”
David Fike- Marygrove College President
“It’s good to see students develop the habit of voting, because you need an informed and engaged public to have a healthy democracy,”
“We are particularly interested in what TurboVote will do in the four years between the presidential elections, where much of democracy happens on the local level. By reminding people to vote, services such as TurboVote can help citizens engage more routinely in public life.”
Alberto Ibargüen- President and CEO of the Knight Foundation
“As community colleges we have a responsibility to encourage good citizenship and nothing is more  important to our democracy than the responsibility to be an informed citizen and vote.”
Larry Whitworth- President Emeritus Washtenaw Community College

This post describes how one of our Dream Team members used TurboVote at her local church for a voter registration drive!

On Sunday at Flatbush Tompkins Congregational Church, youth registered to vote for the first time, while long-time voters opted for TurboVote’s email reminders about upcoming elections. The congregation is largely comprised of Caribbean immigrants who are staunch voters, having witnessed the fight to gain access to that right.  With members who fled oppressive poverty and despotic politicians in other countries, and others who marched in the Civil Rights movement, the Flatbush Tompkins community knows the value of hardwon civic engagement.

I was moved when one woman showed me her voter registration card as she signed up for the service; I had never seen one before, and was truly humbled as she told me about her father’s struggles to vote in the Deep South in the 1940s. As I stood in my church parlor on Sunday, I felt like I was at the intersection of time periods. Surrounded by people exchanging stories of the Civil Rights Movement, I could almost believe that I was getting ready for a sit-in. However, the sound of tapping keyboards and beeping smartphones brought me back to the present as I watched people sign up for TurboVote online. This made me realize that regardless of how the tools we use for civic engagement change over time, our goal of empowering people remains the same.

This post is one in a new series looking at how TurboVote partners are implementing TurboVote and some thoughts on what has worked well for them.

Shelby Taylor is the digital and communications director at the Bob Graham Center for Public Service. The Graham Center is working with a host of civic-centered student groups under the umbrella Gator Coalition for Civic Engagement.

Two laptops adorned with the TurboVote logo, an oversized poster, and a tablecloth—those were the makings of our first TurboVote event at the University of Florida. After scouting out a scheduled event on campus, the Center saw the opportunity to leverage the pre-assembled crowd by placing a TurboVote station in the lobby area where the event was taking place—a pathway certain to be traveled. Students that were short on time were delighted to find that they could access the service from their own computer or mobile device; one student even stopped to take a photo of the url with her phone, just to be sure she didn’t forget.

“I’m already registered,” was a response we heard from several students. “Where are you registered?” was our reply. The answers ranged from the panhandle to the Keys. We took the opportunity to explain that TurboVote would allow them to request a mail-in ballot from their permanent county of residence; no need to travel and no need to re-register. All-in-all it was a great awareness building tool and the first of many tabling events we will stage leading up to the election.

Check out the Graham Center on Twitter at @GrahamCenter and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/grahamcenter

The Graham Center at the University of Florida used a student bottleneck to make sure students would see the TurboVote table.  By encouraging students to use their own computers or mobile devices to register, the Graham Center was able to spread the message of voting to more students.  Utilizing bottlenecks and focusing on the mobile site are two great strategies to encourage students to sign up for TurboVote.

This post is one in a new series looking at how TurboVote partners are implementing TurboVote and some thoughts on what has worked well for them.

The Harvard Institute of Politics was one of the first schools that partnered with TurboVote. Since most of our founding team graduated from Harvard, it was great to gain Harvard as a partner early on.  Below is a story from Laura Simolaris the Director of National Youth Engagement at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

On just one day last summer, one-third of their freshman class signed up for TurboVote, capitalizing on a well-known bottleneck created during the class registration process.

Rather than fan out tables at various places on campus, the team at IOP strategically placed a TurboVote table, complete with laptops, at the jam-packed spot where freshmen would be turning in their class registration cards.

This year, in addition to expanding the work on Study Card Day to upperclassmen as well as freshmen, Harvard will use data gathered from their sponsored to TurboVote users to encourage friendly competition between dormitory social committees.

Harvard utilized student bottlenecks to make it easier for new students to register to vote.  Strategies like this help our partners register more new users and create a more civically engaged student body.

Fatima is a summer partnerships associate at TurboVote and rising junior at Harvard. This post is one in a series looking at why civic engagement matters to individual members of the TurboVote team and how we use TurboVote in our day to day lives to spread that message. The views expressed in this post are her own.

My first political rally was when I was seven. Amadou Diallo had recently been shot 41 times by the NYPD and my parents thought that was a good occasion to introduce me to what it mean to be civically engaged. My seven-year-old mind had a hard time processing the terms “discrimination” and “police brutality”, but I still felt like I was part of something very big, and very serious. Fast-forward ten years, and I was with my friends marching for Sean Bell. A year later, I was standing in front of a mailbox with those same friends, sending off our voter registration forms before we went off to college.

Obviously, I consider myself a politically involved person, as do my friends. Yet somehow, we have all missed elections.  We made signs and held rallies against Amendment 1, for Trayvon Martin, against Stop and Frisk, and a whole host of other things, but if you asked my friends from North Carolina if they actually voted by absentee on Amendment 1, they hung their heads with frustration and regret. Why did this happen? Simply put, rallying and marching were more a part of our daily lives than elections were. We were all talking about meeting other students to discuss local protests and political movements, but we weren’t talking about what that meant for the next election, or when the next election was.

This problem is not unique to me and my friends. People miss elections all the time, and  TurboVote has found a simple way to address it- using technology. My friends and I are unapologetically glued to our smartphones, so we won’t miss email and text reminders that tell us about elections and deadlines. With technology helping me do everything from plan my day to shop, there’s no reason why it can’t help me exercise my basic right to vote.

We were recently featured on Mashable in an article discussing TurboVote and voting. The article has some great insights as to what TurboVote is trying to accomplish and how it plans on changing the voting system.

In the article, our CEO Seth gave some thoughts on how the current voting system works and how TurboVote improves it. Seth starts by talking about how most people approach any issue.
“When you want to do anything else, you start online — except for voting,”

Seth goes on to describe how TurboVote sees the future of voting- simple and seamless.
“I think the future of voting is seamless mail-in voting. The ballot will come automatically in the mail, you’ll get reminder texts, you open your laptop and look at the ballot, do your research and mail it in.”

TurboVote is making voting easy so all you have to worry about is who to vote for!
“We want to be a single place where users can sign up and then only have to worry about who they’re going to vote for.”

Check out the article on Mashable: TurboVote Wants to Be the Netflix of Voter Registration

TurboVote would love to hear from you.  Check us out at www.TurboVote.org or on twitter at @TurboVote

Kate Giaquinto is the communications specialist at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. She’s excited to partner up with TurboVote at her alma mater and to help prepare students to vote this fall.

We had been looking for a way to simplify registration at Saint Anselm College and were introduced to TurboVote at a conference held at Harvard’s Kennedy School. We were impressed with its ease and ability to deal with complicated registration forms from multiple states, all with different due dates and procedures.

Saint Anselm College

So we had to find out how it could work at our small college of under 2,000 students. We took a poll using Survey Monkey, asking students if they were registered to vote and if they planned on voting this fall. Nearly 300 responded by saying they intended to vote this fall, but only 50-60% them were registered and many were unsure how to obtain an absentee ballot from their hometown.

Based on this poll, we realized TurboVote would definitely be a valuable resource at the college. After signing up as a partner this past May, we’ve spent the summer eagerly planning for the fall. In September we will:

We’ll be reporting back on our progress in the coming months and will be checking this blog to find out what other partners are planning.

It’s been a busy summer at TurboVote.  We have signed up over twenty-five new colleges with more coming aboard all the time.  Last week TurboVote sat down with the Chronicle of Higher Education to talk about why TurboVote started partnering with colleges to begin with and what it means for the future of voting on campus.

Our executive director, Seth Flaxman, took some time to explain the problem as he sees it.

“The current way you register to vote does not really make any sense,” says Mr. Flaxman, who received his degree in public policy in 2011. “It is from a different era. ” So last year, he started TurboVote. The Web-based service aims to partner with colleges to make voter registration easier for students. When users sign up on TurboVote.org, the site mails them a voter-registration form, entirely filled out, and a stamped envelope. The idea is to make registration as easy as renting DVD’s on Netflix, Mr. Flaxman says. “What we are trying to do is modernize voting for the way we live now.”

Even though we tend to pay a lot of attention to the student vote during presidential election years, The Chronicle of Higher education points out that the problem is really much bigger than that.

In the 2008 presidential election, 60 percent of college students turned out to vote, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at Tufts University. But two years later, in the midterm election, only 27 percent of college students ages 18 to 24 voted, the center reported. More than half of the nonvoters in 2010 said they had been either away from home or too busy to vote.

We are optimistic though, TurboVote is rolling out to its service to colleges across the country and administrators are already starting to see success and think about how to bring TurboVote to as many people on campus as possible.

This year 20 colleges, including Columbia University, the University of Akron, and Simpson College, a small, United Methodist-affiliated institution in Iowa, have joined TurboVote, meaning they will pay for students to use it. Beyond voter-registration forms, users can also request applications for absentee ballots, as well as e-mail or text-message updates about election deadlines. As long as a user either attends a partner college or has paid about $1.60 for each form in advance, the service continues for all local, state, and national elections…

At the University of Florida, the Bob Graham Center for Public Service raised $20,000 from private donors to pay for its participation, says Shelby Taylor, a spokeswoman for the center. “Providing an application which streamlines and cuts through the bureaucratic red tape,” she says, “will be very helpful in getting our students to vote in this upcoming election.”

… The University of Florida advertises TurboVote on an electronic sign near its football stadium and links to the Web site on its information-technology page. The Graham center, which talks up TurboVote on Facebook and Twitter, plans to work with student groups to hold promotional events this fall. The service may be featured on the Jumbotron at football games.

Needless to say everyone at TurboVote is incredibly excited about all the success we are having this summer, but getting TurboVote on a campus Jumbotron is a particular point of pride.  For more info on TurboVote’s college push click through to the full article (Subscription required), or just get in contact with us.

Online Service Works With Colleges to Get Students Registered to Vote

For info about bringing TurboVote to your campus you can email sam@turbovote.org or call us at (646) 580-VOTE [8683].

Jack Cashion is a Partnerships Associate at TurboVote and a rising senior at Harvard University. He dreams of writing a rock opera about voting.

One of my favorite things about going home is my garage band. During breaks from college, my hometown friends and I get together and write new songs for our band, Buck Wild.  We have performed twice for our friends at house parties. We’re not very good. It’s more about having fun and finding a way to spend time with each other. Every time we come back from college, it can feel like we have less and less in common, but Buck Wild has helped us stay friends years after we graduated high school.

Buck Wild-- coming to a polling place near you

We don’t often talk about politics. When we do, the conversation always ends with someone arguing that his vote doesn’t matter because one vote has never changed anything. I think it’s important to vote whenever I can, but it’s a hard point to argue against. As a result, most of my bandmates are not registered, even as they enter their senior year of college. The worst part is that it doesn’t bother them.

Despite all of this, I recently got TurboVote for Buck Wild. They care enough about politics to talk about it, and my hope was that if I could make it as convenient as possible for them to participate they might be persuaded to vote. I bought a group account from the TurboVote website, called them up, and sent them the link for their personal TurboVote account. Since my friends all check Facebook every day, I thought they might be able to take a minute and sign up to vote.  I was right! The service made it easy enough for these guys to get over their skepticism and register to vote. Maybe civic engagement, like music, can be something that keeps us from drifting apart, instead of just another thing we don’t have in common. It looks like Buck Wild just booked their third gig: live from a polling place near you.

There is no “required reading” at TurboVote, but this New Yorker article comes pretty close. It examines the evolution of the paper ballot in the United States – and is a reminder that TurboVote is only the latest in a long line of changes to how people vote.

Voting in the United States began as a public process. Citizens gathered in the town square and yelled out the candidate they supported. Trying to vote privately was seen as cowardly, and voter intimidation was a major problem.

Ballot reform initiatives have become more popular in recent years, the widespread failure of Diebold touch-screen voting machines in Florida during the 2000 election being the most infamous. In the wake of widespread voting issues and public distrust of electronic interfaces, many states are now returning to the paper ballot.

At TurboVote, we combine the security of printed ballots with the efficiency of new technology. If you ask us, it is the sort of thing that just may make it into the history books. Check out the article if you’re curious to know more.