Registering to Vote Made Simple for Florida College Students
As easy as ordering a Netflix DVD – that’s the equivalent of registering to vote for students in the Florida College System, thanks to a new partnership with TurboVote.
TurboVote is a non-partisan, non-profit digital platform that makes voter registration simple, especially for incoming freshmen with no previous voting experience and little if any knowledge of or interest in civic affairs as they enter college for the first time. Some 125 colleges and universities in the United States, including 35 in Florida, have partnered with TurboVote ‘14, an ambitious campaign to institutionalize voter engagement at every college in America by Fall 2014.
Through this partnership, state colleges throughout Florida will use TurboVote’s innovative “one-stop-shop” voter engagement platform to institutionalize voter engagement and make sure that students have all the materials and information they need in order to vote in every election. When students sign up, TurboVote keeps track of all their elections—local, state and national. If students wish to register, update their addresses or request absentee ballots, TurboVote sends them all the forms and information they need with pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes. For every election, TurboVote sends text message and email reminders to all users with important election information, dates and deadlines, to ensure that they never miss another election.
Participating FCS institutions will decide individually how to integrate the TurboVote platform into established systems and student interactions. They will be able to conduct voter engagement without collecting or submitting a single form. Simply by sharing a link, schools can embed voter engagement into existing processes such as freshman orientation and class registration.
The 11 million Americans age 18-24 who are in college constitute roughly one-fourth of all eligible young voters, according to a study by Tufts University. Voters age 18-29 represented 19 percent of all those who voted in the 2012 Presidential election, according to a poll conducted by Edison Research. Thus proactive efforts that prompt even a relatively small fraction of FCS’s 850,000 students to register and vote could have a significant impact on voter participation rates – and on election results.
Higher education is required by amendments to the Higher Education Act to make a good-faith effort to distribute voter registration forms to each enrolled student. In this modern age of technology, an online service like TurboVote makes it relatively simple for the 28 colleges in FCS to fulfill that mandate.
Moreover, TurboVote offers each college a system for engaging students in the democratic process at its most basic level – voting – as they enter college. Voting has the potential to lead to greater interest in civic affairs in general – and civic engagement is known to have a positive influence on student success. This fulfills the highest priority of the Florida College System: Completion of study goals to graduation/certification, fully prepared to join their community’s work force as productive citizens.
The partnership is funded by the Institute for Strategic Policy Solutions (ISPS) at St. Petersburg College and the Knight Foundation. It represents the first system-wide project of the Florida College System’s Civic Literacy Initiative, which was launched at a forum hosted in October 2013 by the Institute. The initiative aims to make civic engagement a part of the student experience of every student in the FCS system.
ISPS will coordinate roll-out of the TurboVote system through FCS. Designated by the Legislature as a statewide center, ISPS serves as the clearing house for the Civics Education Initiative, hosting its workshops and maintaining this website where best practices in civics education are shared throughout the system. To register for Turbovote, visit: https://spcollege.turbovote.org/register.
Great post. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed! Extremely useful information particularly the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was looking for this certain information for a long time. Thank you and best of luck.