members of the recording industry, who wanted to use their voice and their opportunity when they're speaking to young people every day, to talk to them about civics and political participation and democracy. 21 years later, we still use that partnership model where we leverage the voice of artists and celebrities and media partners and organizations and elections officials like all of you. and we do this to capture the young people as they're turning 18 to make sure they know how to navigate the political process and are educated to make up their own minds to make sure they have a say in how our democracy runs and do that effectively. we're prepared to run the largest single voter registration campaign in this country. our hole is between 1.5 million and 2 million new voters we will bring into the process this year.

going to campuses and communities and setting up tables and encouraging those voters to get involved. we follow up with them about where to go and what their ballot looks like and everything they might need to turn out on election day thought might be more -- two different opportunities where we might partner together. so the first is what we call democracy class. and this is what secretary schultz and i have been working on in iowa. it started a year ago, as we were looking for ways to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passage of the 26th amendment which gave 18, 19, and 20-year-olds the right to vote. i just learned that secretary reid was on the organizing committee and co-chaired it in

the state of washington when that bill -- but he actually helped us craft for ways to celebrate it. what we came up with, inspired ask to bring books to the high schools on that day. give them 100 days to teach their students, a that's the length of time that it was ratified, teach their students about not only the right to vote, but how to use that, get them registered, get them participating. it occurs to us that there's about 12,000 young people who turn 18 every single day. and so if we could figure out systematically to bring those young people into the political process, we would have a very

different democracy. so what if one day, once a year, we could take 45 minutes and celebrate this right to vote for young people in these high schools before they disburse and teach them about the process to get registered. we set up this program in every country last year. we had about 3,000 high schools participate and in all 50 states, we had on average about 30 to 50 kids per classroom plus we did some all school events, all told, we reached about 1 mon .5 million americans registered. as we look at 2012, we thought well that worked really well, let's just do this again, so this year we're going to continue this program and make it an every year thing. we'll call on teachers and we'll support them bringing this

program into their classrooms, so there's a couple things you can do, i know a secretary said he actually went into a hoo in columbus and was of the best teachers. we were talking to students down there. and we have had plenty of opportunities to come in and be the guest teacher with us during these programs. on this day, the 26th amendment was introduced, they can get free materials from buttons and t-shirts and videos and lesson plans and everything they'll need to teach the class. we're actually doing this all across the country and would like to partner with you to help us collect the forms to make sure they're being processed appropriately. especially in states that require the participation of third party registrars.

you could partner with us like secretary schultz in iowa and come up with things that meet the needs of your state specifically. we're happy and very excited to craft those types of programs that work state by state, to ensure these students are getting what they need. the second opportunity is something that i just want to highlight so it's in the back of your heads, because i think it's really innovative and potentially ground breaking, if we can do this right. rock the vote has an online voter registration tool on our website. it just makes it easy to fill out a form. on the back of it, we mutt all that into a registration form and we put it in a pdf. and the person officials it out

and registers it. in other words, we're helping promote and do out reach for voter registration. it's currently living on 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 the elections offices. and as online voter registration is passing in a number of other states, we thought it would be really mooningful if we could continue to do that outreach, bring new people in, but for the sake of the elections office, transfer that information over to the state so they can complete that process on your state's elections sites. so your elections officials

don't have to rekey everything that's been killed out in a data base. and we can continue to do our work of bringing people in and transfer them over to your states. so we have been incredibly honored to work with sec fair rooe reid in washington, 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 prints with a bar code. so when it arrives in an office, you can scan that code and pull the data. even if we can't transfer it online seamlessly into your system. so we're looking for new ways to work collectively in coordination with elected officials. so ensure that we can be promoting and bringing as much people in, rock the vote can

then turning into those young people but we're saving the work of the rekeying and the data entry and everything that might naturally happens as a result of turning in millions and millions of forms into your offices each year. that is something we're excited about and hopefully will continue to work with all of you in figuring out solutions to mode modernize and upgrade our processes. it's kind of fun if you want to see yourselves in action. so i'll make sure that is up on our website, but also some additional buttons and materials about our programs are available in the back.

with the rest of 2012, it's a big year -- and it gives us incredible opportunity to mobilize and bring people into this process. there's 17 million voters who have turned 18 since the last presidential election, it's going to take all of us to reach them and bring them into this process. and we're committed to doing that. so thank you for having me. we hope to work with you on your high school programs, and our voter registration efforts. and if you ever need anything, i'm heather at rock the vote.com. thank you. >> are there any questions? secretary reid? >> i've been very youth engaged in so a lot of terrific organizations, but the group that gets the vote are rock the

vote. and the secretary was very nervous when we talked about a partnership with them, because, you know, rockers and all that, it's a great success. one of those things, have you tracked how many actually vote and participate. and second, and very important is, what rock song did secretary schultz sing at the rock the vote event in des moines, iowa. >> 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 who just flew back this morning from washington state, where she went on the college civics tour, with secretary reed's staff, teaching networks -- much appreciated the work you do. in terms of the, we do track, we track everything.

one of the advantages of so up. >>. >> everyone who registered to vote is given the options to opt in to get election information from rock the vote. once they do that, we provide them with a reminder if there's ever a registration deadline. every year, a local, state, federal, when religigistration deadlines, they move every year. when there's elections coming up, we remind them there are elections, a link to see what their ballot and what their machine looks like, to kind of

demist ni the process. of the 2.5 million people in 2008. about 80%nded up on the roles that. means about 450,000, after they filled out a form, and did all this work to do it, didn't actually mail it in. which is why we're so excited about these online programs and all they have to do is hit submit. but of those 87% on the role, they voted at 80%. they voted the highest percentage of any new voters -- they turned out at higher rates and we call it the election center, we make it superficial and nonpartisan, we hope to build trust with them, throughout this regular and ongoing communication. and we provide them with what

they need.

>> microsoft at the reception was going to be announcing it as well and showing you how it worked and everything. however we got all the way down to the end, working with both faceback and microsoft and when they're going to do the press release, the headquarters of facebook said, wait a minute, one thing we're doing violences the corporate policy. so we have to go back, we think, and work it out. in the puerto rico, i probably will be able to really do a show and tell. wouldn't you know it?

but it is a really exciting idea and what it is that what we will have is -- in fact, i was going to hand out these flyers today to show you as well. and what it is, is it's an app and it's going to be in collaboration with facebook and microsoft that creates an easy link between facebook and our state of washington's online voter registration tool for ment personalized voter services. in my state and we have done presentations before, a system that we worked long and hard on, where once you're registered, you can give your name and birth day and all this specific information comes up about who are your elected representatives, congress, state representative and most counties, it goes down to city council, council motions.

>> the name of all the game and civic partnerships, which are going such great work like i

civics and rock the boat. i started a nonprofit to years ago who was.org work in syndication and helped passed a bill in tree in connecticut that once dedicated one semester course. we do have a little place holder in the curriculum, so we still do have an issue as far as having utilities and resources for teachers. and we take seriously this idea that you get to the kids, the young voters where they are. so in the spirit of that, we were also doing post essay viewing contests. so we sort of teamed up with comcast, and i bring this year today because comcast is one of the sponsors for us. and this is something we maybe could do nationally. it's virtually no corporation to us.

we started a video competition and this was going to be initially for college students to try to get them to make 30-second spots. will be broadcast in the fall just before the presidential election, it's supposed to be using their creative way of reaching out to their own fellow students. how would you convince them how to -- why would you want to vote? this would be created by the college media centers or wherever they do their work. connecticut public television has volunteered to help them edit their work as needed, so they'll do that on a volunteer basis. we figure when you look at the numbers of how many students i was impressed with the statistics, there were 95

million mill less than yals and about half of them were of voting age, and when you start thinking about the numbers of students that we need to get in the system, it's really imblessive. and so we're hoping that these psas will be about by young people out young people. i brought a sheet about it, we're just launching it in february, we have already gotten lots of spompb sorry ships out there from mostly our local food service organizations and others so we'll have prizes and we have gotten the movie theaters to say they'll show them in the theaters before movies and some of the big large movie areas and actually they're going to be shown at half time at the uconn basketball game. so that's a pretty good audience too. so that's one of the things we're doing, i just want to mention one other thing we're doing as a partnership again. and we're doing something that a

civic health index. this is a national program, some of your schools may be the congressional office on the name of the citizenship council. it's an attempt to look at the civic health of your state, not just civic education but 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 organizations. what it does is it sort of starts a conversation about what we were talking about earlier, whether we can have a conversation about civic life in this country. we did an index. it's a survey sort of thing, but it was great because i could form a partnership with some local organizations that are also interested in civic assessment we got a lot of publicity for it.

we'll have real xhufrt conversations about ha our state needs to look like. how can we get more people to participate, because at a local level in many states i'm sure, the idea of running for -- to be a local mayor for selectmen or to run for board of education, you know, we're having more and more trouble finding people to participate on that level. there's a lot of reasons for it, a lot more mobility. it's another way that we can raise that level of conversation about what's going on out there. very quickly, we came to the conclusion as usual, education is the answer. it has been squeezed out of the curriculum. i was considering introducing something let's test civics. if you can't lick them, join them. when we talked on our social studies teachers, they sort of vetoed that idea. we're going to come up with some sort of curriculum around the election using the resources

from my civics and rock the vote, which is when people are paying attention. we're going to focus on teacher training. we found that our elementary school teachers in particular didn't have that high a level of knowledge themselves and were uncomfortable teaching about civics in some cases. we're teaming up with other organizations like hopefully i civics and the bar association to bring additional knowledge to the teachers because they'll teach generations of kids. thank you for giving me a few minutes. thanks. >> we'd like to invite secretary brown to come up and talk about the civics tool kit. >> kwhaefr you want. the time is yours. >> thank you. secretary merrill we used help america vote tax dollars to make a tool kit for teachers for junior and senior high school students. we showed you the demonstration

project. we were searching like many of you for accessible technology for voters with disabilities. one of my wonderful, innovative team members came up with the idea of using tablets to allow voters with disabilities to vote on. then we had special election, a primary in november of 2011. so we used the ipad technology after creating a partnership with everyone counts. they developed the software that cost about 75,000, 76,000 if you include the printers. in november of 2011 we had 89 voters with disabilities use the 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 november of 2011 basically than had used our prior accessible computer stations for several years. so they're 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 ballot, and then 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 drives, so you can go there. 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, and one voter i watched, she had limited vision. so for her by using the tablet technology, she was able to read the ballot for the first time by increasing the font.

she'd never been able to actually read her ballot by herself. so that was really exciting for her. and then i came out here, i went and visited an assisted living facility and watched another senior voter use the tablet technology to vote. the voting assistance team gave her the option to vote on a paper ballot, her normal way of voting, or the tablet. it was really 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'd used the technology. this elderly voter said, no, i really liked using the technology. so we are hearing from folks that they really like it. for folks that are blind, the tablet has the ability to actually read the ballot, and in the future we hope to actually read the voter's pamphlet and then 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 was a really great tool. we believe 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'd like to talk to cobach. >> because of the lighting needs of the networks covering this, we couldn't do that. i'll direct you to a website and you can check it out. we've been discussing the great

amount of activity at the state level. many legislators 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 enacted the secure and fair elections act and decided to use the information campaign about those changes in voting procedures to also try to, you know, drive up voter participation as well. we sent out an rfp to media consultants to come up with ideas for how this campaign could be made effective. 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 from 25 years or so ago. our campaign has photo i.d. they go tie website to learn about the requirements but learn all other kinds of requirements and helpful places to go to register to vote where they can

download all the materials they need. so we're having good success with that. if you want to check it out, see the look of our ads. we don't have the ad on this website yet at gotvoterid.com. the early results suggest at least it's working. we've got the law in place, and we're encouraging and we're pushing these ads out to the public and edge couraging people to participate. we had one local election whereas you probably know in your state, most local elections not involving any state or national issues tend to have low participation rates in kansas. we're lucky if you go 25% and do well at 25%. in one of the local elections where we used this campaign we got up to 39% turnout which is really quite good. the early results suggest it's going with. i courage you to do something similar if you have schanged in your state election laws public campaign to get the word out to

voertz. one other point is we have a cyber civics project, and one idea to lure people into the webb page, people being 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 the kansas? we merged them together, the state history and education about the constitution. i think it works pretty well, and then once we suck them in with the quiz, then they have access to all the resources including a whole mini-curriculum on kansas history which a lot of states are the same way. the curriculum may be sort of thin 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. i want to let you know what we're doing and encourage you to do the same. you can go to our -- the kansas