The Thinking Press

See below for a full list of state by state voter registration deadlines. Here is an email I received from the Atlantans for Obama group regarding some tactics for Get Out The (Student) Vote. The #1 challenge this season is how to most effectively utilize the youth vote which has traditionally shown up in very small numbers.

If you are not in a student body environment you can visit the Barack Obama campaign headquarters (a list of which are available at my.barackobama.com) and volunteer to register voters and get out the vote in your neighborhood.

If you are a student or are located close to a college or university, this is the best strategy I have heard put out by the NYU Students for Barack Obama:

October 2004 poll: More than 2/3 of young voters say they will vote.
November 2004: Youth voter turnout at the polls? Less than 50%.

What happened? One major deterrent was and is the ridiculous complexity of
the voting process.

But the voting process isn’t just complicated, it has been made complicated
for a reason. Low student voter turnout is not because students are lazy.
Students, like nearly every other consistently Democratic voting bloc, are
being intentionally silenced.

Here’s what NYU Students For Barack Obama is doing to fight back:

**NYU SFBO**

Across the country, students are mobilized for this election like they
haven’t been in decades. The national “Students for Barack Obama” (SFBO)
started as one student’s Facebook group: it is now an 800-campus
movement. New York University’s SFBO chapter has grown in parallel: from
15 students at the end of August, average SFBO meeting attendance has
jumped to 75 students.

Now that they have momentum, NYU SFBO is thinking strategically about how
to maximize the impact that momentum will have in November.

**High Impact Voter Registration**

That now is the time to focus on registration is obvious; registration
closes in less than 2 weeks in many of the key battleground states that
will determine the election’s outcome. But in addition to canvassing in
Philadelphia, this month NYU SFBO will launch a massive voter registration
drive on campus in the blue state of New York.

Here’s why: “Many students who could be voting in a swing state are instead
registered locally in New York because they are unfamiliar with or don’t
understand the absentee process,” explains SFBO member Pat McClellan.

And so while NYU SFBO’s registration drive will cover all 12,000 NYU
students housed in the university dorms, it will target NYU’s 2772
potential swing state voters, including over 1000 from Pennsylvania, and
will focus on walking them through the arduous absentee voting process.

This Wednesday, the 150 students who turned out for SFBO’s two voter
registration training sessions will be distributed throughout the
dorms. Their task will be to provide students with state-specific absentee
ballot request and applications forms, to assist in filling them out, and
to stamp and mail them the same day. (“Nobody has stamps,” says SFBO
member Miranda Sherman.)

Also critically, volunteers will gather contact information for students
who request swing state absentee ballots, so that they can be
“phone-banked” prior to Election Day.

- – - – - – more below . . .
– A complete plan, including all logistics and materials, for reaching
students
– from swing states on non-swing-state campuses, is available at this URL
– http://votebackhome.com/highimpactvr.pdf
- – - – - -

**Absentee Registration Bureaucracy **

The complexity of the process has definitely made the project more
difficult. Many states, for example, require a photo-copied ID to be sent
in along with one’s absentee registration. SFBO has considered several
options for this, such as equipping each table with a digital camera to
make ID photographs, which they will later print out. But that is just one
of many hurdles. “At the extremes, states have in the past have not
accepted college as a reason for being an absentee,” says Pat.

“The reason why we’ve taken on such an ambitious project, why it’s
necessary that we do registration trainings, and why it’s even necessary to
do voter registration on campus in the first place,” says Miranda, “is that
voter registration is so complex specifically because the youth vote,
especially in this election, has the potential to affect so much change.”

She’s right, at least according to Zac Roberts, a Pennsylvania college
republican quoted in this Friday’s Guardian newspaper: “Students are
getting engaged again,” Zac told the Guardian, and “I would rather they
just didn’t get involved.”

** Dealing with the University Administration **

NYU SFBO initially requested university permission to conduct a door to
door registration drive this week. But when the university administration
rejected the request, SFBO and the College Democrats launched into
action. “Basically,” says Pat, “we told the university that if they didn’t
allow us to conduct a registration drive on campus we would make it known
that NYU was suppressing the student vote. And that scared them.”

Through negotiations, NYU SFBO wrested some concessions from the
administration: the university administration will send out a
university-wide email asking every residence administrator to flier the
dorms prior to the day of registration, and to go door to door during the
drive to motivate students to go downstairs, where NYU SFBO will be allowed
to conduct a one-day registration drive in the lobby of each NYU dorm. “In
the future I think that we’ll ask for forgiveness, rather than permission
from the university administration,” says Miranda.

** Yes, We Can Make a Biased System Work To Our Advantage **

“It’s clear that there is unprecedented momentum behind this campaign and
this candidate,” says Miranda, “and while right now we’re seeing the
benefits of that, it also means that our generation is putting a lot at
stake in this election, and if we we lose, I’m afraid that a whole
generation could lose faith in the political process.” Let’s not let that
happen. Let’s make sure that this is the beginning of a revival of student
activism, not the end.

–END–

View below to find your STATE and their DEADLINE…

Don’t forget to vote November 4, 2008!

____________________________________________

Voter Registration Deadlines:

October 4, 2008
Alaska, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Washington

October 6, 2008
Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia

October 7, 2008
Illinois, New Mexico

October 8, 2008
Missouri

October 10, 2008
New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma

October 11, 2008
Delaware

October 14, 2008
Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Maryland

October 15, 2008
Massachusetts, West Virginia, Wisconsin,

October 17, 2008
Nebraska

October 20, 2008
California, Kansas, South Dakota

October 21, 2008
Connecticut, Maine,

October 24, 2008
Alabama, Iowa,

October 29, 2008
Vermont

Register at polls
Idaho, Wyoming, Minnesota, New Hampshire

To verify your voter registration:
Click this link: http://www.vote411.org/bystate.php