In May, Knight Foundation announced $1 million in new support for TurboVote, a nonprofit service designed to modernize voting and increase citizen participation. Below, Sam Novey, director of partnerships for TurboVote, writes about voter sign-up efforts associated with National Voter Registration Day. Photo credit: Flickr user Neighborhood Centers, Inc.

On Tuesday, Americans nationwide will celebrate the second annual National Voter Registration Day. More than 750 organizations across the country are planning to hold special voter registration events, sending out email blasts and social media posts to their followers, and utilizing traditional media to get out the inclusive, nonpartisan message. Nonprofits, media, artists, businesses and individuals are uniting to work towards a future where no American is disenfranchised because they aren’t registered or haven’t updated their registration. 

Here at TurboVote we are supporting this important effort in several ways. We build technology that makes it possible for a user to sign up once, online, and receive all the information and materials she needs to vote in every election for the rest of her life no matter where she moves. We provide this technology to partner organizations that use it to empower their members to become engaged in elections and to sign up others.

The organizing team behind National Voter Registration Day, led by the indefatigable Matt Singer of the Bus Federation, is one of these partners. They have assembled an amazing set of materials that make it easy for any organization that joins the National Voter Registration Day effort to use the TurboVote tool to register their members. Their outreach team has been hard at work bringing in new partners. Their results show the incredible power of putting good tools in the hands of effective local leaders. Last year, during the inaugural National Voter Registration Day, more than 40,000 people signed up for TurboVote. 

The other way in which we will be supporting the holiday is through our college partnerships program. Currently, 71 colleges and universities across the country have decided to cover the costs of providing the full TurboVote service to their student body. But the institutions need to do more than just make the service available; they need to integrate it into the fabric of institutional life to sign up students. That means doing things like sending schoolwide emails and building sign up for TurboVote into key bottleneck processes, such as class registration.  National Voter Registration Day is a great opportunity for our partner colleges to kick off these kinds of efforts, and a number of our schools will be organizing drives as part of the nationwide mobilization.

The most exciting effort that our partners are undertaking as part of National Voter Registration Day is happening in Virginia. Thanks to the tireless leadership of Tom Kramer and Peter Martin at the innovative higher education advocacy group Virginia 21, 13 public institutions in Virginia have all committed to send schoolwide emails on Tuesday encouraging their students to sign up for TurboVote and launching a statewide effort to sign up 10,000 voters statewide before the registration deadline for the Virginia gubernatorial election. Their coordinated efforts set an amazing precedent that we expect other groups of colleges to follow in advance of the 2014 elections.

The creation of National Voter Registration Day is one of the most important innovations in voter engagement work over the past few years. At TurboVote we’re excited to support it and see what our partners will do with the technology as part of their efforts on the holiday.

And it’s still not too late to get involved. Sign up here to learn more about how you can get involved in efforts near you.