Vote Back Home

Add one more website to the growing list aimed at helping students strategically cast their ballots, and recruit their friends to do the same:

Vote Back Home

The site is designed to help students in "safe" states organize the students on their campus who are from battleground states. In that way, it's very similar to CountMore, which tries to direct students to vote either at home or at school based on where that vote will have the greatest impact.

Vote Back Home provides organizers with downloadable kits on voter registration for every state, and a wealth of data to help them make the best strategic decisions. Included in that is data on the number of students from each battleground state currently attending school elsewhere:

Pennsylvania --- 76632 Pennsylvania students are away at college in other states.
Ohio --- 62484 Ohioans are away at college in other states.
Florida --- 50452 Floridians are away at college in other states.
Virginia --- 49640 Virginians are away at college in other states.
Wisconsin --- 38708 are away at college in other states.
Michigan --- 36560 Michiganders are away at college in other states.
Colorado --- 32108 Coloradoans are away at college in other states.
Missouri --- 31884 are away at college in other states.
Indiana --- 29380 Hoosiers are away at college in other states.
Iowa --- 16948 Iowans are away at college in other states.
New Mexico --- 12700 are away at college in other states.
Nevada --- 10368 are away at college in other states.

The site also provides a list of the top 300 colleges and universities ranked by how many students are originally from swing states and what percentage of the student body that represents, giving organizers an idea as to how densely populated their campus is with swing students, and how many potential registrants they can find.

The one thing I would say it is missing are the margins of victory. It's useful to know that in 2004, Kerry lost New Mexico by less than 6,000 votes, whereas Kerry lost to Bush in Virginia by hundreds of thousands of votes.

Even so, it's a super-simple with a wealth of information that could help a lot of students organize more efficiently if word got around. So please spread the word.