By Dr. Nathan Price

As many of you know, last year Dr. Renée Bricker and I led a national study that was funded by a grant from the Bernard and Audre Rapaport Foundation. The goal of the study was to better integrate Turbovote into the IT landscape at its partner institutions. Turbovote is an application developed by Democracy Works, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization founded at Harvard University and dedicated to promoting voter registration on college campuses across the United States. Turbovote promotes civic engagement by assisting students in registering to vote, connecting them to their precinct, helping them request an absentee ballot, and providing information about local issues that will appear on the ballot.

When we began our study last year, Turbovote had recently expanded its partnerships to over 200 colleges and universities throughout the United States. The goal of our study was to deepen Turbovote’s integration with its partner institutions to ensure that the application was helping as many people as possible in registering to vote. We were specifically interested in examining the role that IT could play in promoting Turbovote, and the degree to which campus administrators would support Turbovote integration into Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Desire to Learn (D2L). We also wanted to see what various groups like the faculty, student affairs, IT, and administrators knew about Turbovote and how willing they were to promote it.

To undertake the study, we collaborated with 24 project leaders who represented their 24 respective Turbovote partner institutions. (I also administered the survey to respondents at UNG.) We included in the sample institutions that had already registered many students with Turbovote as well as some institutions who were still in the fledgling stages of the process. The project leaders were in charge of administering a survey that Renée and I designed to respondents from six groups on campus: Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, faculty, Communications, Information Technology professionals, and student organizations.

The results of our study indicated that Turbovote has a lot of work to do in promoting awareness of the program at its partner institutions. Nevertheless, the silver lining is that we found that faculty and staff members, administrators, and IT professionals were generally supportive of Turbovote’s mission and willing to help promote it in a variety of ways. We found that administrators were overwhelmingly supportive of integrating Turbovote into the LMS software of their respective institutions as long as Turbovote took the requisite steps to ameliorate security and privacy concerns. Fortunate to have the advice and guidance of UNG IT professionals Scott Marshall and Judy McHan, we were able to speak with IT administrators for the University System of Georgia who helped us provide Turbovote with a plan to integrate into various LMS. This will allow faculty to incorporate Turbovote right into their class pages making the application readily available to students as they navigate these high-traffic areas of their institution’s website.

Renée and I recently participated in a webinar with Turbovote partners from across the country in which we presented the results of our study. We also were delighted to hear from two of our partners–Dr. John Theiss at Lone Star College and Leah Casselia at Kutztown University–who used the results of our study to implement changes that are making a positive impact at their respective institutions. Additionally, we are working with administrators at UNG such as Dr. Tom Ormond, provost, and Dr. Chaudron Gille, associate provost, on a plan that will promote Turbovote across our five campuses.

I’d like to close by thanking all of you for all the support you have shown me throughout this project. This was very much a learning experience for me, and I appreciate all the guidance and advice that I received from many of you. I look forward to continuing to work with all of you to promote Turbovote and civic engagement at UNG in general.