On more than 100 campuses around the country, New Voters Project organizers trained thousands of students to help turn out hundreds of thousands of young, first-time voters to polls on Election Day.
The effort represents the largest so far by the student PIRG’s New Voters Project.
Boosting Participation
“The more people that vote, the better,” said the New Voters Project’s Sujatha Jahagirdar. “Until recently, young voters had some of the worst turnout of any demographic. And since we know that voting is a habit most learn young, we need to turn that around if we want a strong democracy.”
The New Voters Project peer recruitment model has been perfected over the last several elections. It relies on training student volunteers to recruit their friends to register and commit to voting.
A University of Michigan study found that those who received a reminder in a text message one day before an election were 4.2 percent more likely to vote. That’s why leading up to Election Day, New Voters Project organizers and volunteers sent hundreds of thousands of text messages to remind their peers to hit the polls.
Youth Vote Surges
When the student PIRGs’ New Voters Project began in late 2003, its goal was to invigorate democracy with the voices of young people— who have been traditionally infrequent voters—and to get prominent politicians to address the concerns facing the next generation.
Until recently, the numbers of college-age Americans who registered and voted were declining with each new election. In 2004, however, young voters bucked the trend, catching many political observers by
surprise.
In 2006, the trend continued, even in a mid-term election. According to Youth Voter Strategies, “Turnout in the 2006 election more than doubled in the 36 precincts where groups like the New Voters Project actively turned out this age cohort.” In that election, New Voters Project organizers turned out more than 75,000 students to vote and ran operations on 80 campuses.
Over the years, the New Voters Project has helped to register an estimated 650,000 18- to 24-year-old voters, bringing new energy to the political process.
That work has helped broaden the debate to include issues like making higher education more affordable, addressing global warming, as well as providing better access to health care.
