Stoller on Disruptive Field Tools and the Youth Vote

Matt Stoller at MyDD has an excellent essay posted about disruptive field tools like Social Networks and rising youth turnout. Here's the highlight, but you should go read the whole thing.

Rock the Vote, in 2004, registered 1.2 million voters with a simple online voter registration download tool. That's more than twice as much as they had ever registered in any other cycle, including the youth-spike year of 1992. And the online voter registration tool wasn't particularly flexible. What's happening this cycle could be ground-breaking, in that Rock the Vote is building a voter registration engine with an API anyone can innovate on top of. Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote. That's a big deal. They will also be able to get credit for registering you to vote, since the voter engine will let people see how many people have registered through a page. It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration.

I've been combing around voter registration statistics, and the number of 18-29 year old voters who voted in 2004 versus 2000 jumped from 15.8 million to 20.1 million, an increase of 4.3 million. With Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube turning intensely political, it's pretty clear that voter registration, and specifically, being able to count voter registration and compete over it, will be a killer ap. Finally, field will be at least in some part measurable and put online. Facebook alone has 22-24 million members, and is growing at 150,000 members a day. MySpace is over 100 million. And though it's unclear how many of these user accounts are citizens and how seriously they take participation in these public spaces, the fact that there are these public spaces, and that they are gargantuan, is a game-changer. My guess is that the opinion leaders in these communities are traditional pundits and stars, but it doesn't have to be this way, and bands and bloggers are in the mix as well.

If Rock the Vote experiences the type of growth of regular Web 2.0 startups like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc, there's no reason that 18-29 year old voting block can't expand its share of the electorate by 3 or 4 points. This would swing Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. And it would put North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas into the swing category, while pulling New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania out of swing state territory.

I've heard similar things about Rock the Vote's voter registration tool, but I heard that it would be built into the FaceBook API - presumably as part of the new F8 applications. Regardless, I think the rest of the post is absolutely on point w/r/t what such a registration tool might mean for turnout. The youth vote is going to blow up huge this year, and self-organizing tools like FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, and yes - new ways of doing voter registration and GOTV online - are going to be some of the primary drivers of that surge. The barriers to entry have been massively lowered.