Snapchat Helped Register 400,000-Plus Young Voters In 2 Weeks: Here’s Why You Should Care

Written by Dana Sanchez

Oct 25, 2018

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By displaying a link to a voter registration page, the popular social media app Snapchat helped at least 418,000 users register to vote in a two-week period, and many of them are residents in potentially contentious states such as Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas.

Snap started promoting voter registration for the midterm elections at the end of September, partnering with the non-partisan voting group Democracy Works to allow users to register using the TurboVote.org app for two weeks. It also sent out video messages to users and linked to the profile of every user age 18 years or older, The Verge reported.

Snapchat hopes to improve the historically low voter turnout of young people, New York Times reported.

More than 8 million young Americans who weren’t eligible to vote in the 2016 election are eligible now, according to Time:

To many of them, the 2016 election was yet another example an older, less diverse generation of voters making decisions that they disagree with on everything from the environment to the Supreme Court. Trump won solid majorities of voters over 45, but people under 29 voted against him by almost 20 points.

Wildly popular among millennials, Snapchat is ideally suited to help encourage voting. It has a limited demographic — 85 percent of Snapchat’s 158 million daily users are between the ages of 18 and 34, Forbes reported in March 2017.

In the 2014 midterm elections, less than 20 percent of 18- to-25-year-olds voted. About 78 percent of people between ages 18 and 24 as of January this year still use Snapchat, according to Statista.

Image: Freepik| Illustration Anita Sanikop

In addition to the 400,000 users registering via Snapchat, 600,000 signed up to receive election reminders from TurboVote, the majority in the 18-to-24-year-old range, Deadline reported. The top states for TurboVote signups included California, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, and Georgia.

Snap offers filters so users can encourage their friends to register. The Discover feature included stories about midterm elections and voter registration efforts happening in different communities.

On National Voter Registration Day in September, Snapchat published a post urging people to vote, saying it’s “one of the most important forms of self-expression we have in America,” CNN reported. The company has engaged in a continued effort to encourage voter registration, including before the 2016 election.

Celebrities and other tech companies including Twitter, Instagram, Google, and Facebook also encouraged voters to register ahead of the November midterms by sending out reminders and partnering with TurboVote.

“Black-ish” star Yara Shahidi, 18, started Eighteenx18, a campaign to bring together young influencers to encourage voting their social platforms.

Taylor Swift, who was silent for years about her political views, urged her 112 million Instagram followers to register to vote in the midterms and said she would be voting for Democrats. About 65,000 people registered to vote in the 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org — that’s more than registered in the entire month of August, Time reported.