Rock the Vote, Good Charlotte and Jason Mraz welcome students with Nov. 2 election reminder
Kicking off this week across the country, Rock the Vote (RTV) will be taking college dorms by storm. As students move-in to their new residences, RTV will be there registering them to vote for the upcoming midterm elections.
About one-third of registered young voters have moved since 2008, when youth engagement reached record levels, and nearly every college student will soon have a new address. RTV is making sure these young people can continue to build the youth vote momentum by registering or re-registering them for the November 2nd elections.
RTV field teams will greet students as they head back to campus with voter registration forms along with text messages, emails and printed materials from various musical artists encouraging them to get registered. At Florida A&M University, for example, first-year students will discover a celebrity welcome letter on their desks from Grammy Award winning artist Jason Mraz encouraging them to fill out the attached voter registration card. In part the letter reads, “Your participation in the 2010 midterm elections on November 2nd is critical to maintaining the power of young people so that we have a say in our country’s future.” Students at other schools will receive a letter from Benji and Joel Madden of the band Good Charlotte.
Voter registration efforts on the ground are planned throughout the college move-in season in RTV’s five midterm election target states: North Carolina, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio. RTV will rock the residence halls and the bookstores, student ID centers, and class registration lines of some of the nation’s biggest and most active campuses, including the University of Florida, Ohio State University, Temple University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and more.
In addition to providing hands-on support for voter registration, RTV is also making sure students have the tools to organize “move-in” voter registration events themselves. With RTV’s online action platform, students on any campus can create a “move-in” event and invite all their friends to participate.
Through outreach on the ground and online, RTV is making sure that every college student is registered or re-registered at their current address enabling them to vote on November 2nd and helping continue the trend of increased young voter turnout from the past three election cycles.
*According to U.S. Census data and CIRCLE (www.civicyouth.org).
About Rock the Vote | www.rockthevote.org
Rock the Vote engages young people in our democracy and builds their political power by registering, educating and turning them out to vote, by forcing the candidates to campaign to them, and by making politicians pay attention to youth and the issues they care about once in office. We use music, popular culture, new technologies and old fashioned grassroots organizing to engage and mobilize young people to participate in every election, and provide the information and tools they need to do so. And we amplify the actions of those young people who step up to claim their voice in the process in order to create political and social change.