A new online program designed to quickly register students to vote saw a successful unveiling Wednesday, according to officials at the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at UF.
The program, TurboVote, also alerts students by sending email and text reminders about election deadlines. Students can then request absentee ballots from their local election authorities.
Some of them have already started.
“More than 300 individuals have already accessed the system,” said Shelby Taylor, digital communications director for the center.
Students will be mailed their voter registration or absentee ballot form. TurboVote completes the form and mails it with a postage-paid, pre-addressed envelope.
The creator of the program, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government alumnus Seth Flaxman, likened the program to Netflix.
UF will be the fourth university in Florida to host TurboVote, following Florida International University, Miami-Dade College and University of Miami.
The Graham Center gathered enough donations to cover all costs of the program, Taylor said.
“There isn’t a cost for students,” she said. “[The department has] already taken care of that for them.”
Students can sign up for the service at http://ufl.turbovote.org.
Taylor said TurboVote hopes to create a 10 percent increase in the number of ballots cast by voters in the age bracket of 18 to 29 this year.
According to a 2009 Project Vote report on voter participation in the 2008 elections, fewer than half of 18-year-old citizens were registered to vote.
Alex Kerrigan, a 19-year-old finance sophomore, would have fallen into that statistic. He said he was still waiting to register to vote.
“I don’t care about it until it’s the presidential election,” he said.
But Kerrigan said receiving email and text alerts about election dates would encourage him to participate in more elections.
“If I knew about it every time I got a text, I would vote in the election,” he said.
