so they can be registering their own constituents. in other words, we're helping promote and do outreach for voter registration. it's currently living in over 23,000 websites from major news outlets to celebrities to local community organizations. in the last election we had about 2.253 million people fill out a voter registration application on that tool. they then print it, sign it, and mail it to your election offices. as online voter registration is passing in a number of states we thought it would be really meaningful if we could continue to do that outreach, bring new people in, but then for the sake of the user and the elections office, transfer that information over to the state so they can complete that process on your state's election sites, so your elections officials don't have to rekey everything that's already been filled out in a database and we can

continue to do our work of bringing more people in and transferring them mostly over to your states. so we've been incredibly honored to be working with secretary reed in washington, secretary bowen in california and secretary brown in oregon and discussing these various ways that we can do this. and i should say in states where we don't have online voter registration possible, we're also looking at ways where the form it prints with a bar code so when it arrives at an office you can scan that code and pull the data so at least you're not rekeying it even if we can't transfer them all online seamlessly into our system. all this is to say, we are constantly working new ways to work, especially in this base of new technology and online for voter registration, to ensure that we can be promoting and bringing as much people in. rock the vote can do our work and then turning out the young

people and increasing participation in your states. we are saving the work of the rekeying and everything that might naturally happen as a result from turning in millions and millions of forms into your offices each year. >> that is something we're excited out and hopefully work with you and continually revolutionize your systems going forward. and i guess just finally i'll say i had some video to show you that we've made available at rockthevote.com. it highlights some of the work you have done in the classrooms with rock the vote. it's kind of fun if you want to see yourself in action. i'll make sure that is up on our website but also initial button and materials about our program is available in the back. with that, i guess 2012, it's a

big year, because so many people are paying attention to elections. it gives us an incredible opportunity to mobilize and bring those people to the process. there are over 17 million voters that turned 18 since the last presidential election. it's going to take all of us to reach them and get them into the this process. we're committed to doing that and thrilled to work with all of you during that process. thank you for having me. we hope to work with you on our high school programs and our voter registration efforts. if you ever need anything, i'm heather at rockthevote.com. thank you. >> are there any questions? secretary reed. >> yes, heather, first for the other secretaries i've been very gain in youth voting throughout my career. do a lot of work with terrific organizations but the group that get the results are rock the vote.

some of the secretaryies were very nervous when we talked about a partnership with them, rockers and all, but it's a great success. i have two questions. of them is of those who register, when you track a voter, how can you see then they gave it up. what rock song did the secretary sing in des moines? >> that's in the video. well, i should say not only have you been involved but incredibly gracious partner. we currently have a staff person that just flew back this morning from washington state, where she went on the college civics tour with secretary reed's staff, teaching best practices to their network of college opportunities for 2012. so much appreciated, the work you do. in terms of the -- we do track.

we track everything. one of the advantages of so much of or work coming in through the online data port tals, we can track who is participating or not, and improves our programs every year. everyone who registers the vote is given the option to opt in to get that. most people do. once they do that me provide them with a reminder, of there is ever a registration deadline. we have plenty of people now in your database, every election a local, state, federal, when the registration comes up so they have the opportunity up to date in their registration. with our audience, at least a third move every year. at least. and then second, when there are elections coming up, we remind them of the election times and location. a link to show them what the ballot and machine will look

like to demystify the process. we have volunteers to come and encourage them to go vote. as a result, rock the boat, 2.3, 80%. that means about 450,000 after they filled out a form and did all this work to do it didn't actually mail the form, which is why we're so excited about the online programs and all they have to do is hit submit and be on the system. and then of that 80% that ended up on the rolls they voted at 87%. they had the highest voting rate of all new voters put on the roles in 2008. when you match them to anyone who didn't come through our system, they turned out at higher rates. we call it the election center and make it nonpartisan. we hope to build trust with them throughout this regular and

and ongoing communication and we provide them what they need so they can show up and feel confident about the polls. >> any other question. i won't break any windows today with my singing. no, well, thank you, heather. thank you for coming. we really appreciate it. >> thank you. all right. now we're going to turn some time over to a few secretaries who asked for a few minutes to talk about some specific subjects. secretary reed, why don't we turn the mike over to you to talk about the project with microsoft and facebook? do you want to come up here -- >> oh, i guess i would. >> -- so the cameras can see your pretty face? >> okay. >> thank you.

>> thank you, secretary schultz. this is actually a non-announcement. this week we were going to be making announcement regarding the state of washington and partnership with facebook and microsoft announcing a new program where going into facebook you could register to vote in the state of washington, the microsoft, at the reception was going to be announcing it as well and showing how you it worked and everything. however, we got all of the way down to the end working with both facebook and microsoft, when they're going to do the press release, the headquarters at facebook said, wait a minute, one thing we're doing violates their corporate policies. we have to go back, i think, and work it out. but puerto rico, probably be able to do a show and tell.

wouldn't you know it? but it is a really exciting idea. what it is, is that what we will have -- i was going to hand out these fliers today to show you, as well. and what it is, it's an app. it's going to be in collaboration with facebook and microsoft that creates an easy to link between facebook and our state of washington's online voter registration tool for a personalized voter service. we have in my state and i've done presentations before, we have a system that has worked long and hard, called "my vote." once you're registered you can go in to my vote, give your name and birth date and upload all the specific information about who you're elected representatives, congress, state representative and most council.

it goes down to city counsels, school board, county positions all of the way and then you think of the value of that information, being in the social media for these -- for people, i think it's going to be a tremendous step forward. and since facebook reaches 800 million users, as i think we've heard mentioned a few times over the last couple of days, i think that is going to be a really good way to go. so thank you for giving me time for my non-announcement. >> secretary merrill, would you like to come up and talk about your psa contest? >> thank you very much. thank you for the great presentations today. i think it sounds -- the name of all of this, the game and civic participation is really partnerships with other organizations that are doing such great work, like icivics and rock the vote.

i'm somebody who has been around with civic engagement a long time. i started a nonprofit 30 years ago in connecticut who was doing work in civic education and actually helped pass a bill in 2003 in connecticut that did dedicate a one-semester course in civics for every graduating student in connecticut. so we do have a little placeholder in the curriculum. it's still an issue in terms of having materials and resources for teachers. we do take very seriously this idea that you get to the kids, the young voters where they are. so in the spirit of that we also were doing poster and essay contests. so we decided to try a new idea which was a video contest. and we sort of teamed up with comcast. that's one of the reasons i bring you here today because comcast is a sponsor for us.

and this is something maybe we could do nationally. but it's virtually no cost to us. we start a video competition and this is going to be initially for college students to try to get them to make 30-second psa spots that comcast will broadcast the winners of the contest will be broadcast in the fall, just before the presidential election. it's supposed to be basically introducing their creative way of reaching out to their own fellow students. how would you convince them -- why would you want to go vote? we're hoping for creativity. this would be created by the students through the college media centers or wherever they do their work. we have connecticut public television has volunteered to help them edit their work if needed so they'll do that on a voluntary basis. we're hoping to get some real creative spots to put on in the fall. i mean, we figure when you look at the numbers of how many students -- i was impressed with those statistics from rock the vote. there's an estimated 95 million millennial and half of them are voting age.

this sort of when you start thinking about the numbers of students that we need to get in the system, it's really impressive. so we're hoping that these will be psas that will be about young people, by young people. i'm hoping they will be, you know, a little different than what you ordinarily would get. i brought a sheet about it. we're just launching it in february. we've already gotten lots of sponsorships out there from mostly our local food service organizations and others. we will have prizes and we've gotten the movie theaters to say they will show them in the theaters before movies and some of the big large movie areas. and actually they're going to be shown at halftime at the uconn basketball game. that's -- that's a pretty good audience, too. so that's one of the things we're doing. i just wanted to mention one other thing we're doing as a partnership. again, we're doing something called the connecticut civic health index. this is a national program, some

of you states may already be doing this civic health index. it's through the congressional office on -- i've forgotten the name of it. citizenship counsel. it's an attempt to look at the civic health of your state, not just civic education but also sort of social indicators about whether people are participating in their communities, whether they're trying to solve problems at a local level or volunteering on local boards and organizatio organizations. what it does is sort of starts a conversation about what we were talking about earlier, whether people are -- whether we can have a conversation about civic life in this country. and we did an index. it's a survey sort of thing but it was great because i can form a partnership with local organizations also interested in civic assessment. we got a lot of publicity for it. we're now having forums around the state. community conversations about

what our state needs to look like. how can we get more people participating? because at a local level in many states, i'm sure, the idea of running for -- to be a local mayer for selectman or board of education, we're having more trouble finding people who will participate on that level. there are a lot of reasons for it. a lot more mobility. people don't connect in the same ways. it's just another way that we can raise that level of conversation about what's going on out there. qnclusion, as usual, that education is the answer. it really has been squeezed out of the curriculum. i was kind of considering introducing something that would be like let's test civics. if you can't lick them, join them. when we talk to our social studies teachers, they vetoed that idea. so, we're going to come up with some kind of curriculum around the election. i think using the kinds of resources you heard up here from icivics and rock the vote, this is now is when people are

paying attention. so we're going to focus on teacher training. what we found, that our elementary schoolteachers in particular didn't have that high level knowledge themselves and were uncomfortable abo about civics in some cases. we're teaming up with some other organizations like hopefully ll vics and the bar association teach generations of kids. thank you for giving me a few minutes. i'll pass it around. >> thank you. >> i'd like to invite secret the civics tool kit. whatever you want. the time is yours. secretary merrill, just to share with you, we used help america vote act dollars to develop a civics tool kit for our teachers gear towards junior and senior high school students. yogh what i came up here to show you

is our demonstration project. we were searching from like many of you for successful technology for voters with disabilities. one of my wonderful innovative team members came up with the idea of using tablets to allow people -- voters with disabilities to vote on. and then we had special election, a primary, in november of 2011. so we used to ipad technology after creating a partnership with everyone counts. they developed the software which costs about $75,000, $76,000 if you include the printers. so in november 2011 we had 89 voters with disabilities use ipad technology. just to give you a comparative, 86 voters voted in the independent party primary election during that primary. so we had more voters with disabilities use the ipad

technology in 2011 than had used our prior accessible computer stations for several years. so they are very excited about it, as well. just to clarify. the tablet doesn't actually -- you don't actually vote on the tablet. you use the tablet to mark the ballots and essentially it talks to the printer and the printer prints out a ballot. in oregon we like to have a paper trail so we wanted to make sure that we have that. the written materials are available on your flash drive so you can go there. but i just want to share two quick stories and i'll -- hopefully i can get this to work. i was able to watch a couple of voters go out and use the technology. one voter i watched, she had limited vision. and so for her, by using the tablet technology she was able to read the ballot for the first time by increasing the font. she had never been able to actually read her ballot by herself.

that was exciting for her. before i came out here, i went and visited assisted living facility and watched another senior voter use the tablet technology to vote. and the voting assistance team gave her the option to vote on a paper ballot, her normal way of voting, or the tablet. and it was fun to watch her. she went ahead and marked her ballot, using the tablet, the technology. and then they asked her if she wanted to go back to the written ballot once she had used the technology. and this elderly voter said, no, i really liked using the technology. so we are hearing from folks they really like it. for folks are blind, the tablet has the ability to actually read the ballot and in the future we hope to actually read the voters pamphlet. obviously you could also work in

language capability, as well. so i'll pass this around so you guys can take a look at it. it's a really great tool. we believe that we were the first jurisdiction in the united states to use this as a tool. very convenient and very accessible for our voters. thanks. >> it's very exciting. we would like to turn the team over to secretary cobot. come up and speak about voter id outreach. >> thank you, secretary schultz. this will be a really short presentation. we're going to present a video but because of the lighting needs of the networks covering this we weren't able to do that. i'll just direct you to a website and you can check it out on your own later if you want to. we have been discussing the

activity at the state level and many state legislatures in the 2011 legislative session passed laws changing, modifying, improving whatever the voting procedures in the various states and those changes came in all shapes and sizes. we in kansas acted the elections about and we decided to use the legislation campaign about those changes in voting procedures to also try to drive up voter participation as well and we sent out on rfp to media consultants to come up with ideas for how this campaign could be made effective and we had a very creative one that won our bidding process and is already being deployed. it's basically a play on the old got milk ads you may remember from 25 years ago or so. our ad campaign is got photo id. we're using that cam fine send people to a website, where they not only learn about the requirements from photo id law but all other requirements and helpful places to go to register to vote and download materials they need.

we're having good success with that. if you want to check it out, you can see the look of our ads. we don't have the ad on our website yet, gotvoterid.com. yes, we took that website. the early results suggest it's working. we've got the law in place and we're encouraging -- we're pushing these ads out to the public. and encouraging people to participate. and we had a one local election whereas you probably know in your state most local elections, not involving any state or national issues tend to have very low participation rates in kansas. we're lucky if you can get above 120% you're doing well. -20%, you're doing really well if you can get above 25%. and in one of the local elections where we use this campaign 39% turnout, which again, for a local election is really quite good. so the early results suggest that it's going well. i encourage you to do something similar if you've got any changes in your state election laws that warrant public information campaign to get the

word out to voters. one other point i would like is we also have a cyber civics project. one idea we had to lure people into the website, people being both adults and kids who can benefit from the civics education, is to have a 20-question quiz. how much do you know about your constitutional rights and the history of kansas. we merged the two things together, the state history and education about the constitution. and i think it works pretty well. and then once we sucked them in with a quiz they have access to the resources including a whole mini curriculum on kansas histo history, which, again, i think many of your states are probably the same way, the curriculum may be thin and in public schools and in resources for home-schoolers and the like, about your state's history so we try to fill that gap with a pretty robust cyber civics program on your website. i just wanted you to know what we're doing and encourage you to do the same. >> what is the website? >> you can go to the kansas

secretary of state website and will is a portal there for our cyber civics quiz and then the other is gotvoterid.com. thanks. >> thank you. >> thank you for all those great presentations. it's exciting just to see. i'm so glad at our conference we're having time to do this. some of you might have some exciting ideas. this might have inspired you. we have a little bit of time if there are some quick other reports from other states. not to put any of you on the spot. secretary reed? please. >> i mentioned earlier in the conference that secretary merrill and i are involved with our state public affairs network, which is analogous to c-span that is filming us today.

and needless to say, it's a tremendous vehicle for the public becoming better informed about their government. and they're interested in coming and doing a presentation to us. actually it's their national association, public affairs networks and interested, i think, in partnerships with secretaries of state around the country. just wanted to know if you were interested in doing it, i can arrange for either the voter participation committee or for the full conference. >> take that information in and make it as part of our discussion planning for our plans for the summer. >> i don't know whether it would be more realistic to wait until they're back from the winter conference in puerto rico or not. >> washington in the winter, puerto rico in the summer. yes? lieutenant governor. >> in alaska we will have to send out a voter card to every voter in the state with the redistricting that's happening. and so we're in the process of redesigning the voter card. and i would be interested in

suggestions from other secretaries on how that works in your state. we're going to try to tie it to a mobile app so it can show you where your precinct is, bring you to the updated ballot on -- for your precinct, and i hope i can find room for the alaska flag song on the back. we'll see. but at any rate, i would be interested in what other folks have done and if there's already some software pre-made on that we're interested in that, too. >> i think all of us are just now sort of getting to that point. it seems like this is something that we could put out through our network and for even secretaries that aren't here, to be able to get more feedback. we have one particular? >> yes. louisiana started prior to october primary, we have on a smart phone where you can now pull up your individual information, how you're registered, brings you to your

precinct by gps map. that was very important because reapportionment and it pulls up individual ballot for you to review from the comfort of your home, so you can familiarize yourself with it. we're not certain if we're the first state that's done that but we have that now available. it's been very well received. i had a little bit of difficulty getting it out like i wanted because i was a candidate. i think the news media was a little hesitant to -- felt like maybe they were promoting me. but it's getting legs. and some of you are willing to share that with anyone. >> thank you. any others? please. le. we do the same thing, except we have started with texting in mississippi. and we started out texting myself. initially on election day we received hundreds of texts from them directly to us, their

telephone number. we call them back immediately. i found texting to be very effective on election day for people who were out and moving around. >> thank you. for those who couldn't hear, the great success in mississippi using texting both before and on election day. i think a number of states are beginning to step into that technology. so thank you. others? oh, secretary. >> thank you. one of the -- south dakota has a number of where do i vote widget, so people can find out where to vote on their primary and general election day. something i've wanted to do since taking office and we've been testing it on a number of communities, is for the smaller elections. your city elections, your school elections, and getting that sample ballot, using the same system so that people are becoming more familiar, that i just need to go to the secretary of state's site. it's going to tell me where i need to vote for any election. whether it's the big ones or small ones.

that's been very successful in the communities we've tested so far. >> thank you. others? i want to share one idea that we're just talking about in minnesota, but i think it's perhaps just a refreshment for something they know almost all of you do. in minnesota we found that our vote in honor of veteran program really does touch some people who maybe have become discouraged or cynical or not really connected to the voting system. and that whole program had brought them into a new participation. and keeping in mind this is the centennial year of the civil war what's in our civil war task force we're beginning to talk about a vote in honor of a civil war veteran as a little bit of a slight change and perhaps a new angle on that, not every state