Largest Youth Voting Org Launches Innovative Discord AI Chat-Bot to Register Voters
NextGen America’s ‘VOTE-E’ Discord bot will engage and help register young voters across the country
Washington, D.C. — Today, NextGen America, the largest youth vote organization in the country, announced its one-of-a-kind voter registration program that leverages a Discord chat bot to connect and engage a new cohort of voters– the gaming community. The bot, VOTE-E, will help people register to vote, remind them about election dates, and assist users in finding their local polling place.
NextGen America’s chat bot, VOTE-E, can be added by streamers and communities of any size to their server, and will hold one-on-one conversations with users via direct messages, referencing helpful voting information from official resources in their state.
VOTE-E interacting with a Discord user
“Galvanizing the next generation of voters means connecting with them where they’re at, and for so many, that’s in online communities,” NextGen America President Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez said. “NextGen America’s Discord bot VOTE-E is a ground-breaking innovation that is taking youth-vote organizing into the future. Young people are passionate about issues affecting their communities and are consistently under-resourced and under-organized, VOTE-E is another means to chip away at this disparity, providing young people with the critical education and resources they need to show up on Election Day via a trusted, accessible platform.”
“We are so excited to build a tool that helps gamers get civically involved. Campaigns often view both young voters and especially gaming communities as an afterthought, and this tool reflects our interest in modernizing outreach to young people.” NextGen America Vice President of Data, Research, and Polling Grant Wiles said. “We want to move from asking voters to “Pokémon Go to the polls” to bringing a civic engagement resource to where young people are already spending their time– Discord. We have plans to further strengthen our outreach to the gaming community, so stay tuned!”
Discord is a social platform where users interact with their friends and communities over voice and text chat. Discord is one of the fastest growing social platforms, exploding in popularity during the pandemic, with an estimated 72.5% of its 514 million user base being between the ages of 18 to 34. Discord’s primary use is to organize communities around various shared interests, with gaming as the main focus. To add VOTE-E to your Discord server, you can visit NextGen America’s website.
The Discord program complements NextGen’s on-the-ground mobilization efforts in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Virginia which are engaging young voters and providing them with resources ahead of the 2024 elections.
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About NextGen America
NextGen America is the leading national organization for engaging young people through voter education, registration and mobilization. We invite 18-to-35 year olds — the largest and most diverse generation in American history — into our democracy to ensure our government works for them and to find new solutions to the dire challenges facing our society and the world. Since 2013, NextGen America has registered more than 1.3 million young voters and contacted 9.6 million young eligible voters during the historic 2022 midterm elections.