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Background: CoPIRG’s New Voters Project is a nonpartisan effort to register young people and get them to the polls on Election Day. Since launching the New Voters Project in the 1980’s, we have been doing this work for two reasons. First, we believe democracy is strongest when citizens participate and for too long, young people haven't been full participants. Second, we believe the best way to get political leaders to pay attention to young people and their issues is to demonstrate that young people are a viable constituency that can be mobilized using tried and true techniques.

Overview of Fall 2010: CoPIRG hired 3 full-time organizers to work with students on a set of campuses including CU-Boulder, CU-Denver, Community College of Denver, Metro State, Colorado State, Front Range Community College and Pueblo Community College.  We ran our campaign in four phases.  In the first phase we established on campus coalitions, set goals, and met with the local registrars.  In the second phase we ran an intensive recruitment effort to identify and mobilize volunteers and promote online voter registration.  In the third phase we ran a peer-to-peer voter registration drive utilizing on campus tabling, class raps and dorm storms.  In the fourth phase we ran a Get-Out-the-Vote drive utilizing everything from class raps to tables to phonebanks to text messages. 

Leveraging Technology - We expanded our online techniques to reach the wired world of the young voter, including having student leaders text message, email and Facebook their friends to the polls.  Expert analysis finds that such intensive, peer to peer GOTV efforts will maximize the number of students who show up the polls. 

Building a Body of Research - Partnering with the Analyst Institute and Credo Mobile, we also conducted several experiments around GOTV best-practices.  Building on ground-breaking experiments led by the Student PIRGs and Credo Mobile that revealed text message reminders can increase turnout by four percentage points, we conducted several follow up tests to assess the impact of the timing and messaging of text messages on turnout.  We also performed an experiment to assess the impact of mailing back students’ own pledges to vote in the days for the election on their turnout.  Results will be published this spring

Results:
     Voter Registration – we registered over 1987 students to vote.  That breaks down as follows
o CSU – 932
o CU-Boulder – 352
o Auraria campuses – 641
o Front Range Community College and Pueblo Community College – 61
     GOTV – we focused our GOTV efforts on 3 campuses and made 10,920 GOTV contacts
o CU-Boulder – 6239
o Auraria campuses – 4479
o CSU – 202
     Recruitment and Leadership Development
o Made 99 recruitment class announcements in front of approximately 6471 students
o Identified  874 potential volunteers
o Had 77 students volunteer on the campaign
o Had 47 students take on leadership

Breakdown of the GOTV numbers
Of the 10,920 GOTV contacts we made in the last 2 weeks:
* 1029 signed a pledge card that we databased and then mailed back – 593 mailed back (part of a test so we did not mail all back). 
* We sent 1254 automatic text messages (also part of a broader test).
* We had 7021 contacts from friends texting friends in the final 3 days.
* We generated 200 pledges to vote via peer-to-peer phone calls
* We generated 823 pledges to vote via face-to face contacts either in the Trick or Vote program or through other tabling.