Due to Hurricane Sandy, the state of New Jersey is allowing several alternative voting methods for displaced voters and first responders.

Vote at the nearest polling place

You can vote at the polling place nearest where you are on Election Day, instead of your home polling place. To find an accessible polling place, go to www.google.com/elections/ed/us/vote. If you can do this, we strongly recommend voting in person.

Vote by email or fax

You can cast your ballot via email or fax. The deadline to request ballots via email or fax is Tuesday, November 6 at 5 PM.

UPDATE: as of 2pm on November 6, the Election Protection staff are urging voters in Essex, Hudson, and Bergen counties in NJ to vote at their polling places because of issues with fax/email voting.

1. Fill out a New Jersey ballot request form.
   • You still need to sign the application. (If you do not have a scanner, we recommend getting help from FedEx Office, the UPS Store, or a local printing shop or library).
   • If you are voting by email, you must include your email address on the form.
   • If you are voting by fax, you must write your fax number (you can use the email address space) on the form.
2. Send it to your county clerk using the fax or email information listed below.
3. Your clerk will provide further instructions on where and how to return your ballot—follow them carefully. You need to email or fax your return ballot by 8pm on Friday, November 9.

Today’s post comes from Vance Aloupis, executive director of the Children’s Movement of Florida one of TurboVote’s most successful non-profit partners.  Welcome Vance! 

One non-profit’s story…

The objective of The Children’s Movement is simple: Make children a real priority in Florida. Higher than roads. Higher than prisons. Higher than anything. The question is: How do you do that? The answer: Educate and engage hundreds of thousands of Floridians to insist that more be done for our youngest citizens.

As a statewide advocacy organization, voter registration was a no-brainer. And once the decision was made to begin registering voters, there was no better platform from which we could jump than TurboVote. Like many good non-profits, our resources are limited and our team is never as large as it needs to be. While we have organized representation and leadership in 17 regions that cover almost all of Florida, virtually all of our “on-the-ground” leadership is volunteer. So, our question was: How do we deliver this message to as many people as possible  — in as effective a manner as possible – without having an army of people, computers and locations to physically sign folks up? And here’s what we learned. The three steps to non-profit success with TurboVote:

1. Partner up: Our first step in building a strategy for our voter registration model was to identify all of the organizations (with large databases) that would have real interest in providing this resource to their members. We then began to contact them individually. (We often find that mass emails – even to 10 or 15 people – can be detrimental to success.) We explained TurboVote, why The Movement was doing it, that we were “paying for it,” and that we needed their help to spread the message. We afforded enough time to walk everyone through their questions and concerns – and built ownership one organization at a time. After identifying all 35 of our partner organizations, we sent each of them a toolkit to use over the next three weeks. This included links, logos, steps to success and a draft text that they could cut and paste to supporters. Most of the organizations simply cut and pasted the text we sent, while others drafted their own text and developed beautiful banners and images that further enhanced the message.
2. Write. Send. Edit. Follow up: No one message will work for voter registration. First of all, many folks will already be registered to vote. Some won’t see the point in voting. Others just won’t read your email. We tried to develop messages that spoke to each of these populations – talking about all of the aspects of TurboVote (especially the absentee ballots and reminders), offering important statistics about child welfare in Florida and trying to engage folks through catchy subject lines (especially ones that referenced the few remaining days or hours to register). We drafted multiple texts for our TurboVote message and did our best to deliver them to the constituencies we felt needed to hear it. If one message wasn’t working well (or one tweet or Facebook post), we’d tweak it and re-send. Once we were able to convince someone to sign up, we would then send them an email (usually within 24 hours) thanking them for their registration and asking them to then share TurboVote with five friends – again including links and draft texts that made the process as simple as possible.
3. Harass: If your campaign is primarily online (and almost entirely email-based), the odds are against you. So, repetition is key. Over the course of three weeks, our supporters received at least five emails from The Movement that mentioned TurboVote. Some were sent in our weekly message, others were sent in region-specific emails, but everyone in our database should’ve received our TurboVote link at least five times. Beyond that, tweets were posted every two hours and Facebook posts were made four times each day. And this does not include the possibility that many of our supporters received the same message from one or more of the 35+ partner organizations. For every one person that we were able to register to vote on TurboVote, more than 300 people received the email. It’s just very hard to convert folks online. So, you increase your chances for success if you ensure that someone has more than one opportunity to read and act on your message.

Voter engagement – and, therefore, voter registration – is fundamental to the work of The Children’s Movement. In our brief three-week TurboVote campaign, we not only had fun and signed up a heckuva lot of people, but we learned a lot, too. The ability to have real people at strategic access points can be very effective. (In two mornings at a local early education center, we were able to register 44 parents in four hours.) But this requires volunteers and staff and computers – something we were unable to coordinate with such short notice. In Year Two, you better believe we’ll have an on-the-ground outreach plan…to complement all that we do online.

On Wednesday, TurboVote signed up our hundred thousandth voter. Awesome!

Many of those voters discovered us yesterday, on the first-ever National Voter Registration Day. The NVRD organizers created a new holiday for voting, and helped convince a lot of people to attend a holiday party hosted on our site.

Some of yesterday’s events: Google featured voter registration (with a link that led to TurboVote) on google.com in many states. Reddit sent readers to our partners at the Internet Votes campaign, FourSquare, Ben & Jerry’s, and some other cool folks tweeted TurboVote links and shout-outs.

On the school front, our 57 college partners signed up a ton of students—about 25,000 in the past two weeks alone. 21 schools signed up over 500 students each, six schools signed up over 1,000 students each, and nine schools have reached more than 20% of their respective student bodies.

I also need to thank the Sunlight Foundation, Craig Newmark and the Youth Engagement Fund—they all came through at the last minute with a boost of funding to support our tech infrastructure. Sunlight and Craig made it possible for us to hire additional engineering talent in anticipation of a certain upcoming election and YEF helped us cover the cost of a massive database server.

Our operations team is now hard at work making sure everyone gets their forms and reminders. While I’m tempted to sit back and watch our user counts, I’m starting to focus on what happens after Election Day—because this year is just the beginning for TurboVote.

Next year we’re not just planning to sign up every college in America, we’re planning to partner with local election authorities and offer TurboVote to ten entire counties, cities or towns as we pilot a version of the TurboVote service with a new back end built specifically for election administrators.

Stay tuned for a major update about our government initiative, and in the meanwhile, please pass on this job description for an Operations Associate. This person is going to help me make sure TurboVote’s internal operations are scalable.

We’ve come a long way since our Kickstarter campaign. Looking forward to launching the next phase of our adventure with you all.

This is what democracy looks like!

Seth (and the rest of the team)

PS: And in case you missed it, I was on NPR’s Marketplace Tech Report this Monday. Unfortunately, they cut my favorite line: “TurboVote is funded in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.”

Job Description, Data Quality Assurance Associate

This position is located in Washington D.C. It is a temporary position lasting approximately one month.

Democracy Works seeks data associate to assist with quality assurance of data in support of a major technology company’s election efforts.

Responsibilities
● Audit vendor supplied data sets of polling places and ballot information to ensure high quality.
● Work with software engineers to ensure successful integration of data sets.
● Follow up with local election authorities and other contacts in order to verify data points.

Minimum Qualifications
● Nearly obsessive attention to detail.
● Highly skilled at information organization, especially working with non-standard data sets.
● Basic knowledge of American politics and elections.
● Excellent project management skills; including timeline tracking and communication and the ability to collaborate across teams and outside organizations.
● Bachelors Degree. In lieu of degree, 4 years of experience.

Preferred Qualifications
● 1-2 years of relevant experience including work at a voterfile vendor, campaign data team or political data consultancy.

Candidates should send a resume and write a pithy email about themselves to Seth and Katy at work@turbovote.org. The email should have the subject line: “I love data.”

Democracy Works is seeking an Operations Associate to help build turbovote.org.

We believe that if voting were more convenient, more people would vote; and if more people voted, we could reinvigorate local and primary elections, politicians would be held more accountable, our leadership would be more representative, and our democracy would work better (at least most of the time).

To that end, TurboVote is a web service that makes voting as easy as renting a Netflix DVD. We provide free email and text message reminders for all elections and mail (yes, snail mail!) completed voter registration forms and absentee ballot request forms, along with addressed, stamped envelopes.

We’re currently working with 57 colleges and a tech company you may have heard of before. You can learn more about us on ABC, Mashable, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

As this is a startup, we’re used to moving quickly. You will make sure TurboVote’s internal operations remain nimble and efficient while we grow (and learn the nitty gritty skills needed to run a startup).

Here’s what you’ll be doing:
• Streamlining internal processes
• Coordinating with our bookkeeper to make sure financial information is being properly recorded
• Invoicing partners, depositing payments and printing checks
• Applying for grants and writing grant reports
• Running payroll, as well as managing HR and insurance paperwork
• Scheduling meetings and assisting executive staff with miscellaneous operations-related tasks
• Preparing annual reports and documents for board meetings

Qualifications:
• Extremely organized (we can teach you how to manage HR and insurance documents)
• Great with words (can write warm and conversational emails without sounding too informal, can write with perfect grammar without sounding stuffy, can write an inspirational and well-researched paragraph about democratic participation that isn’t stiff or corny)
• Great with numbers (we can teach you about QuickBooks and payroll)
• A passion for getting details exactly right

You’ll fit in if:
• You want to get this done right now
• You want to get this done right
• You’re a not-so-secret idealist
• Why is your favorite question
• You enjoy pub trivia (especially if you can help us best our perpetual 2nd-place finish)

Nice to have:
• Experience with QuickBooks
• Experience with data visualization
• Experience with nonprofit accounting
• Experience with writing grant applications and annual reports

This full-time or part-time position will be based out of our Brooklyn headquarters. Candidates should send a resume and write a pithy email about themselves to Seth and Katy at work@turbovote.org. The email should have the subject line: “Will work for democracy.”