Snapchat Has Helped Register More Than 1 Million People To Vote

Call it unfiltered civic engagement: As of Thursday morning, Snapchat has helped register more than one million people to vote.

Of those, 56% are first-time voters and 64.5% are between the ages of 18 and 24 a coveted, yet historically hard-to-activate demographic.

A Snap spokesperson told HuffPost they’ve seen the most signups in Texas.  Florida, Georgia and North Carolina all battleground states were also well-represented, Snap said. President Donald Trump carried all four in 2016, and losing any one of them this year  to Democrat Joe Biden could deal a severe blow to his reelection prospects.

According to data collected by TurboVote, Snap helped register roughly 450,000 voters ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in 2018, of whom 57% went on to actually cast a ballot in the election. That number will likely skew higher in 2020, as voter participation in presidential elections typically far exceeds the midterms.

Turbovote is Snap’s nonpartisan partner in the registration efforts. 

The digital outreach is “especially vital” this year, according to a study by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University.

The study notes that the COVID-19 pandemic has “limited many usual electoral outreach and education efforts,” and that “vote-by-mail (which youth are largely unfamiliar with) will play a major role in the election.”

The push follows similar efforts across the Facebook ecosystem, where more than 2.5 million people have registered to vote. The company hopes to register more than 4 million people across its Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms prior to the Nov. 3 election.

TikTok, meanwhile, recently launched an elections guide , with information on how to vote provided by a handful of non-partisan third-party organizations.

That effort follows in Twitter’s footsteps, which launched a similar voter information tab last month.