Doors Open Wider For Youth Vote Web Site Eases Registering - A Lot, Thanks To Rock The Vote
Trying to make voting ever easier for young people, the group Rock the Vote has moved registration tables to rap concerts, movie theaters and surfing championships.
This week, the group began a service on the World Wide Web that will fill out young people’s registration cards and even stick on the stamps.
The prospective voters need only sign and mail the cards. “Pretty soon, they won’t even have to get up off the couch,” said Jay E. Reiff, the political director of the North Carolina Democratic Senate Caucus.
The program relies on the standardization of state requirements and the spread of mail-in registration that followed the federal “motor voter” law of 1993.
Mark Strama, 28, the program director of Rock the Vote, said the site that went on line on Thursday was aimed at people 18 to 24. “There’s a generation of young people who have become more engaged in political dialogue as a result of the Internet,” he said.
“This turns the dialogue into action.”
A visitor to the Web site clicks on a state. Then a form pops up with blanks for information required to register. The form is transmitted to a clearinghouse in Minnesota, where the information is printed on a federal voter-application card. Postage is added, along with the address for that state’s registration agency.
“Two weeks later, by snail mail, they get the completed form and send it in,” said Ricki Seidman, a former Clinton administration official who is executive director of Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that is mainly financed by the recording industry.
The group, founded in 1990, put young voters in the spotlight in 1992.
The group is working to increase participation as well as registration for the November election. A few days before the election, most voters who registered on line will get a reminder by postcard or E-mail to go to the polls and vote.
The Census Bureau says that in 1994, 37 percent of citizens from 18 to 24 were registered voters, compared with 67 percent of all citizens of voting age.
Jo-Anne Chasnow, associate director of Human Serve, a group working for universal voter registration, said that because the new program required Web access, it would mainly benefit college students.
“I hope Rock the Vote now will find a creative way to reach other young people - dropouts and people who went to work after high school,” she said.
Seidman said her group hoped to make the service available to everyone by adding a toll-free telephone line this summer.
Critics of the motor-voter law, which allows registration at motor-vehicle agencies and other government offices, contend that registration that is too easy can produce uninformed voters.
xxxx HOW TO The Internet registration site, paid for by MCI, can be reached at http://www.rockthevote.org.