May 29, 2007 9:12 AM

Working Assets helps Rock the Vote in 2008

Matt Stoller – a former activist fellow at Working Assets - has a post at MyDD.com about disruptive field tools that could be game changers in the 2008 election.

Rock the Vote, in 2004, registered 1.2 million voters with a simple online voter registration download tool. That's more than twice as much as they had ever registered in any other cycle, including the youth-spike year of 1992. And the online voter registration tool wasn't particularly flexible. What's happening this cycle could be ground-breaking, in that Rock the Vote is building a voter registration engine with an API anyone can innovate on top of. Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote. That's a big deal. They will also be able to get credit for registering you to vote, since the voter engine will let people see how many people have registered through a page. It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration.

What Stoller didn’t mention in his MyDD.com post is the role of Working Assets in what we expect to be the biggest channel for youth voter registration in 2008. Stoller plays an important role in this story. As does Zack Exley, another “Activist Fellow” alum of a residency at Working Assets.

Here’s the story of how Matt Stoller and Zack Exley helped Working Assets create a Web 2.0 voter registration tool which will help Rock the Vote and others register millions of voters in 2008.

It started in during the 2006 election cycle when Matt Stoller was an activism fellow at Working Assets’ offices in San Francisco.

After helping over 400,000 people register to vote using online forms in 2004, Working Assets had rolled out a new and improved voter registration tool, developed in partnership with MobileVoter. The new site represented a huge advance over the 2004 voter registration tool.

Stoller wasn't that impressed - even though the new voter registration site was much easier to use than the old site. What Stoller wanted was a way to make it easy for regular people to run a voter registration campaign online through their personal web pages, their blogs, their email lists. But to be able to do that he needed two things:

* A widget for the voter registration form that could be embedded in a blog or web site
* A dynamic counter that would allow a blog or web site to know how many people were filling out forms as a result of its campaign.

A widget and a counter, Stoller drilled into us in his characteristically colorful and high-decibel manner. He was jumping around our offices wondering how we could have missed something so obvious when creating a second generation online voter registration tool.

It made an impression. He was right. After 2006, we started thinking about how we could create the next generation tool that would make registering voters online as easy as embedding a YouTube video.

Fast forward to February 2007. Zack Exley was starting a stint as activism fellow in our San Francisco offices. Zack and Adam Klaus (a member of the Working Assets political team) were discussing how to build the Matt Stoller Memorial Voter Registration Widget. And Zack said, the way to do this is to create a Web 2.0 services engine for online voter registration as an API. That way you can build a widget on top of the API. But you can also allow people who want to go beyond the widget to build their own sites on top of that engine.

At the heart of all of Working Assets’ online voter registration applications were a few key processes: delivering the correct registration instructions and requirements for a user’s home state; validating information input into the form; and generating a .pdf of the application that was easy to sign and drop in the mail. The API approach offered an easy way to encapsulate these functions, making it easier to build flexible and creative applications that are able to keep up with rapid changes in the technology/politics sphere.

Zack and Adam then got on the phone with a top notch developer who was enthusiastic about the idea and had all sorts of thoughts of his own about how to make it work. With this team, we knew we could build something that would be bullet proof - and would be easy-to-use on the user side.

At the same time, we were talking with Heather Smith, newly tapped to turn Rock the Vote into a powerhouse for youth voter registration. She loved the widget idea and decided to partner with Working Assets to make it the core registration technology for the relaunch of RockTheVote.com.

Click "Read More" to read more on the nuts and bolts of voter registration done the Web 2.0 way.

Working Assets is building a Web services API for generating a National Voter Registration Application .pdf using an online form. We're also building a widget that works on top of the API and can be embedded in any blog or web site as easily as a YouTube video and includes a dynamic counter. The widget will also accommodate a few custom questions that can be set up by widget partners - these questions can be issue oriented, about opting in to future communications, etc. We're also developing a public administration site for widget users that will allow them to log in and retrieve the voter registration and custom question data captured through their widgets. The widgets will be co-branded by Working Assets and Rock the Vote and will be available for free to anyone who would like to use one.

As Stoller notes below, the stakes are huge.

I've been combing around voter registration statistics, and the number of 18-29 year old voters who voted in 2004 versus 2000 jumped from 15.8 million to 20.1 million, an increase of 4.3 million. With Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube turning intensely political, it's pretty clear that voter registration, and specifically, being able to count voter registration and compete over it, will be a killer ap. Finally, field will be at least in some part measurable and put online. Facebook alone has 22-24 million members, and is growing at 150,000 members a day. MySpace is over 100 million. And though it's unclear how many of these user accounts are citizens and how seriously they take participation in these public spaces, the fact that there are these public spaces, and that they are gargantuan, is a game-changer. My guess is that the opinion leaders in these communities are traditional pundits and stars, but it doesn't have to be this way, and bands and bloggers are in the mix as well.

But given the challenges facing our country, very few things – ending the war, stopping global warming – are more important than helping young people vote at the same level of the rest of the electorate.

Stay tuned for more on this from Working Assets.