| Having just got home at 3 AM (yes, ready to lead, pick up the phone, from day one, etc) from the 24 hour Voter Registration marathon at 50 locations across Austin, some early reports of our successes are coming in. Major kudos to Katherine Haenschen, Glen Maxey, Joe Hamill, Laura Hernandez, Mike Litt, Ian Davis, Zack Hall, Matt Glazer, and lord knows how many volunteers who made this work.
From the "Hook the Vote" coalition at the University of Texas, led principally by the University Democrats though it was a broad based coalition, the official count was 5,659 registered students yesterday alone (as I twittered just after midnight when we broke out in a chorus of Bohemian Rhapsody on the steps of Gregory Plaza). That's truly amazing and tops the 3,000 one day record at UT we set on the last day to register in 2004 (back when I was an officer in the good old days).
Even more amazing, was that many people were registered even after the University Democrats struck an agreement to have UT put a registration card in every mailbox at the start of the semester and have Voter Registration part of the RA check in. AND even after nearly ever apartment complex in the city had voter registration packets dropped on their doors via the coordinated campaign in the last six weeks.
When I left the collection center tonight, over 15,584 voter registration cards had been counted so far from the 50 voter reg sites today. There are still some of those sites out and will be added to the total tomorrow so that number will grow in the next 24 hours. That's not counting estimated 10,000 cards the Tax Office (which is in charge of maintaining the voter rolls) received independently via mail today and not counting any of the registration cards that were postmarked today and will arrive over the next couple of days there which are valid registrations.
I'll update everyone as more solid numbers come in, but needless to say, Monday was the single largest voter registration day in the history of Travis County.
P.S. Yesterday I independently paid for a Google AdWords campaign targeted to Austin pushing people towards the Voter Registration Location post. I'll publish the highly successful results of that campaign later today. |
