Rock the Vote Goes Mobile to Register 1.5 Million Young Voters by Smartphone

Rock the Vote, the nonprofit group focused on engaging young voters, is kicking off a joint effort with PromoJam, a Los Angeles-based social media promotions startup, with the goal of registering 1.5 million new voters for this fall’s presidential race – and challenging restrictions on voter registration.

The mobile-focused campaign, which starts today, will enable anyone with a smartphone to fill out an entire voter registration form directly from their device. At the same time, that new voter can email themselves a copy of their registration, then print it out, sign it and send it to their local elections office.

In addition to boosting political participation among young people – especially the 18-24 age group – the joint effort will serve another purpose. Both Rock the Vote and PromoJam view it as a shot across the bow at the current limitations of voter registration (online registration is currently allowed now in only 10 states, for example), as well as laws around the country clamping down on how people register to vote.

The handling of voter rolls is a hot topic right now. The U.S. Justice Department filed suit this week against the state of Florida over its plan to purge voter rolls – a no-no within three months of an election (and Florida has a primary vote coming up in August).

“We hope this year causes such a ruckus, because our goal is to change the way voter registration works in America,” Amanda MacNaughton, co-founder of PromoJam, told ReadWriteWeb.

MacNaughton pointed to “19th-century” systems and processes for registration across the country, as well as how tethered young consumers and voters have become to their phones, as motivations for the effort.

“We thought, OK, you want to make it harder for people to register? Well, we’ll take this effort to the sky,” she said. “We’ll create voter registration on the phone and take it to young people on the device where they use it the most.”

The campaign had a test run of sorts at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, this year, debuting a “scan-to-vote” T-shirt encouraging youth voter registration on the fly. The shirt – emblazoned with a QR code, was developed in collaboration with Junk Food Clothing, Threads for Thought, Rock the Vote, RedLaser and PromoJam.

Users could scan a QR code on the T-shirt to launch a PromoJam mobile page with educational videos about the election, Facebook “like” buttons and the ability to register to vote. The shirts are available at Whole