Conyac で依頼された翻訳結果を公開

TurboVote Wants to Be the Netflix of Voter Registration

TurboVote, an up-and-coming startup, wants to become the “Netflix of voting” by revolutionizing voter registration and vote by mail via the Internet and snail mail.

The concept is simple: Users fill out voter registration or vote by mail forms on their Internet browser, then TurboVote prints an official document based on that data. TurboVote sends users a paper copy through snail mail along with an envelope pre-printed with the address of each user’s local voter election board — very much how Netflix’s original business model works. Once a user gets the form and envelope, all they’ve got to do is sign the form, stuff it in the envelope and drop it in the mail.

But that’s not all: TurboVote also send users text message reminders when registration or voting deadlines are approaching to remind them to get their paperwork in the mail. Reminders are sent for elections at every level of government, including local, state and federal.

While several states have passed laws allowing citizens to reigster to vote online, the majority have yet to get on board with the concept. Seth Flaxman, 27, co-founded TurboVote after getting frustrated at the process of voting by mail while he was studying at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Like many other digital entrepreneurs, Flaxman built TurboVote to solve his own problem. He believes the voting process is antiquated and ripe for digital disruption.

“When you want to do anything else, you start online — except for voting,” said Flaxman. “I think the future of voting is seamless mail-in voting. The ballot will come automatically in the mail, you’ll get reminder texts, you open your laptop and look at the ballot, do your research and mail it in.” The company started with a focus on vote by mail, but later shifted to include voter registration as well.

“We wanted to make vote by mail really easy,” said Flaxman. “We saw that as the way to modernize the voting system and then thought ‘oh, we also have to do voter registration.’ For us it’s about everything. We want to be a single place where users can sign up and then only have to worry about who they’re going to vote for.” TurboVote is a non-profit that is subsidized by universities, such as the University of Florida, Harvard University and University of North Carolina at Charlotte, that want to offer the platform’s service to their students. the company recently announced its twenty-fifth university partnership.

The platform’s earliest financial support came from Kickstarter, but TurboVote has since received sponsorship from the Knight Foundation, Google and the Sunlight Foundation. On TurboVote’s horizon is the possibility of partnerships with local governments, to which Flaxman’s team is pitching the platform as a mechanism for getting more citizens to vote in elections with typically low participation. For Flaxman, TurboVote is very much about finding a way to boost voter participation rates, especially among young people who tend to disregard vote by mail and absentee voting. “When we did our pilot in 2010 with 300 students, 29% of them said they probably wouldn’t have voted without the service,” he said. “In 2010, 66% of college students who didn’t vote attributed it to being out of town, working or forgetting. Those are process problems we can easily solve. Apathy is a problem, but I think we can and should have a frictionless democracy.”

Would you use TurboVote to help you register to vote and be reminded about elections? Share your thoughts in the comments.