The League and MoveOn Team Up for a Digital Primary

If it doesn't seem fair to you that a measly 6% of Iowans get an over-sized say in picking our next nominees, The League of Young Voters and MoveOn have a solution to your pre-caucus envy. Today the two groups teamed up to launch their own primary on Facebook. Via a new application that they hope will highlight the beliefs of young voters and showcase their interests in the primary process.

The League Primary is a new third party application on facebook that allows users to select their choice for President (in either party), highlight their 3 most important issues, and cast their ballot among their numerous Facebook networks. Votes are tallied nationally, and for each network to which a member belongs (for instance, I belong to the New York network, so I can view results nationally or within New York). Students will be able to view results for their school networks and so on, creating innumerable " virtual primaries" limited only by the total number of networks on Facebook.

Because The League and MoveOn are working to spotlight the influence and engagement of young voters, participation is limited to those 35 years of age or younger, and voting will end on February 5th, the so-called Super Tuesday when a majority of states will be going to the polls. For Facebook users who may not be sure where their loyalties lie, MoveOn and the League have partnered with Glassbooth, a non-partisan web effort that matches users with a presidential candidate based on their issue preferences. To ensure the integrity of the vote, users can only cast one ballot, though they may change their vote at anytime up until February 5th.

The effort is ostensibly non-partisan, though many of the supporting groups - including Rock the Vote, Living Liberally, SAVE, Young Voter PAC, WireTap, The Bus Project, Center for Community Change, and others - have a progressive bent or are non-partisan in name only. Through these partnerships, The League and MoveOn hope to hit at least 500,000 Facebook users today through partner lists alone. After that, they're hoping that Facebook's viral potential will take over. Participants are asked to declare a reason for their vote, which is then broadcast out to their friend networks via the news feed, broadcasting not only the application, but also an endorsement for their candidate to tens or hundreds of users. Shy users can opt out of that particular feature and cast an "anonymous" ballot.

Reactions from the tech and politics communities has been positive so far. Micah Sifry at Tech President is already calling the application the "most innovative political use of the Facebook Platform that I have seen so far, and if the League of Young Voters' application takes off, the primary could have a galvanizing effect among the millions of young people who spend upwards of two hours a day on the giant social network hub."

This may be true, though the project is not without pitfalls as well. From the standpoint of media and narrative, the project is a risky one, and rather than function as a cure for the "short shrift the media gives to young voters," the project could potentially backfire on its creators. One of the major media critiques of young voters is that they'd rather sit at home and play on Facebook than do the dirty, face to face work of political organizing. If more young people vote in the Facebook primary than in the real primaries, that might cement the image of young voters as political dilettantes who don't actually show up at the polls. Such a narrative do more harm to young voters than good.

The organizers are well aware of this danger, and have offered up a number of counterpoints, noting that the lists generated by the application will be used to direct unregistered voters to the Rock the Vote voter registration page, and that participating organizations will be contacting those who vote about turning out at the "real" polls on their state's primary day. They will also work to offer participants other ways to get involved off-line. If MoveOn and The League could convert that online energy among Facebook users into offline action, that would be truly impressive. But with a media more accustomed to writing their conventional wisdom than dealing with nuanced facts, it might be hard for organizers to message around discrepencies in turnout online vs. off-line.

Sifry is right that this is probably the most innovative use of Facebook this election cycle. Whether or not that turns out to be a good thing in the long run is yet to be seen.