League of Young Voters

CNN has a new subsite within their www.cnn.com site specifically for The League of 1st Time Voters (not to be confused with the League of Young Voters)

See the League Here

Pretty cool when you have the most successful cable news network focusing more on young voters than the republican candidate for the Presidency.

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.

This is interesting.

We tried a similar ask during my time at MFA. We set up a microphone (similar to the famous Howard Dean "Bat" or one of these money-counting thermometers you always see), told people how we were going to spend their money (organizing some shows leading up to the election), and asked for contributions of $5, $10, $15 bucks - a coffee, a pizza, a CD. I think we set a goal of $15,000 and barely raised $4,000 (with the help of some generous artists).

One problem might have been that we didn't have a strong enough bond with more than a handful of our supporters - most of whom had a stronger connection to a band than our organization. Our ask might have rung hollow, too, as it was pretty widely known how well-funded we were (we weren't shy about talking about it on the site). The video makes the League's ask a lot stronger than what we did at MFA, and I'm betting that they've got a list with tighter bonds to the org than we did.

Self-sustainability is the holy grail that all nonprofits strive for - and its something donors look to achieve as well (they can say job well-done and invest in other places). Over-reliance on large donors for operating funds is an albatross on the youth movement's neck - it makes us hugely vulnerable to having our legs cut out beneath us, and in some instances forces us to compete with our partners for the same pools of money. It's not surprising - young people have less cash to spend on something like this and sustain our own institutions - yet its the opposite situation from what's going on with the national party and in the netroots, where Democrats are making huge gains among small dollar donors, and thousands of small donors are uniting to help more progressive candidates get on the ballot and win.

I wonder how this will go down.

Cross posted at MyDD. Please recommend.

The League of Young Voters is reporting that they are losing a full 1/3 of their national funding, and rumor has it that the reason is that Democracy Alliance is cutting off all of its youth outreach efforts. If true, this is really fucked up.

The League is one of the only youth groups that appeals to a truly multi-racial audience. They're focused in how they distribute their resources, they are culturally in touch with their target audience, and they are serious about getting shit done. At almost every conference I go to, there is a huge contingent from the League sharing the experiences and improving their game. The fact that they are struggling for funds is bad news for the progressives everywhere.

If the rumor mill is correct, and Democracy Alliance is abdicating all responsibility for youth funding, that is even worse news. Democracy Alliance is supposed to be the progressive answer to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and the immense conservative funding network set up by the Coors, Olin, Scaife, Koch and Bradley Foundations. In 2003, Conservative Foundations gave approximately $48 million to conservative youth organizations. That's almost as much as Democracy Alliance gave to all progressive grantees in its first two years of operation. We need to be spending more money on youth programs, not less. After the last three elections you would think progressive donors would understand that.

I still haven't spoken with the League yet for my book. This seems like as good a time as any to get in touch. I'll also make some other inquiries and try to find out if its true about Democracy Alliance. Will report back when I know more. If anyone has more information, please email me at mike [dot] connery [at] gmail [dot] com.

You can help out the League by donating here.

Normally I'm not a fan of the idea of voter guides. As a mass-turnout strategy, there is some evidence that they are not effective. A lot of times you'll hear that folks don't vote because they feel uninformed and don't want to make the wrong choice. But evidence suggests that voter guides - lengthy, text heavy affairs - don't alleviate those concerns. Maybe people don't read them, maybe they don't trust them. Maybe "I don't know enough" is just an excuse for someone who really doesn't want to vote.

I don't know. And - as in a lot of youth research - turnout is the measurement. Very rarely do we get reliable statistics about whether a particular tactic increases partisanship, which strike me as the potential outcome of a good voter guide. (But this is a whole other ball of wax).

Nevertheless, this experiment by The Pittsburgh League of Young Voters seems like a promising reinvention of the voter guide concept. They're creating short interviews with local candidates, posting them on YouTube, and aggregating them on their website along with information about where people vote, and which candidates are running in their districts.

Maybe these will be more effective - at increasing turnout, or at increasing partisanship in voting. Video gives you a much better sense of these (normally very obscure) candidates as human beings, and these videos are certainly more comprehensible and accessible than pages of text listing the issue positions of dozens of candidates. It's also nice that they boiled it down to the two issues that are of most concern to The League and its members.

This also seems pretty doable for a lot of groups. With iMovie (included on any Apple) and a throw-away digital video camera, or even a cellphone with video options, you can probably capture 30 seconds of worthwhile video. Sound might present a bit of a problem. I'd love to hear what any audio/video folks think.

Also - I added some stuff to the Online Video article in the Communications section of the wiki. If you've got more to add, please do.