Go forth and BeCounted

Surfing the Internet now lets people cruise through voter registration. The BeCounted group has… Surfing the Internet now lets people cruise through voter registration. The BeCounted group has just launched a new Facebook application that gives access to information for voter registration. BeCounted reads its users’ profile data to find their home states. The application then asks users if they are registered to vote and where. Once the user is plugged into the application, the program tells users the voter registration requirements and informs them about absentee voting. The application also helps determine which state the user’s vote will be the most competitive in. If a user goes to a college in Pennsylvania, which was a swing state in the 2004 election, the application will recommend that he registers in Pennsylvania as opposed to another, less competitive state. In another feature, users can track their Facebook friends’ progress through the voting registration process and can earn ‘points’ for recruiting friends to the application and encouraging them to register. Lissa Geiger, a Pitt student who works on the planning committee of the Student Vote Coalition, said, ‘I don’t think it is a replacement for face-to-face contact ‘hellip; But it definitely gets a different demographic that may not have registered otherwise.’ Working since the beginning of freshman move-in in August, the Student Vote Coalition has registered more than 600 Pitt students. BeCounted designed its application to facilitate ease of voting and to help voters get registered in time. It’s the first comprehensive student-run voter registration application on Facebook. Rock the Vote, another get-out-the-vote organization, has a similar application, although it is not student-run. Rock the Vote’s application had more than 4,500 users as of Tuesday night. BeCounted is the brainchild of John Nantz, a senior at Stanford University. Frustrated by difficulties with his voter registration for the 2006 mid-term elections, Nantz decided to try to change the way young people register to vote, said Michael Terrell, the co-director of BeCounted. Most of the designers of the application worked on collecting a voter registration database and absentee ballot requirements for all 50 states and more than 3,000 counties. The data-gathering effort lasted from March of this year through June, and the work culminated in the application’s release two weeks ago. More than 1,000 people have used the application as of Tuesday, but only two Facebook users from the Pitt network were using the application. More than 200 of the application’s users attend college in California, the home state of the BeCounted project. Between Ohio and Pennsylvania, the two closest elections in 2004, there are fewer than twenty users. ‘ ‘It’s helpful, but I don’t think it will swing the election,’ said Geiger. In the 2004 presidential election, only 46 percent of 24 million potential voters age 18-24 actually voted, according to the US Census Bureau. But Terrell has set his sights high. ‘We are looking to have 50,000 active users by Election Day. That would be a very good benchmark for us,’ he said. That number is less than 0.5 percent of the national potential voting population ages 18-24.