Facebook will pin a box with information about voter registration on the top of the News Feed for every US user who is of voting age starting tomorrow, July 3rd, the company announced today.
The box, once it’s live, will show you information about how to register to vote, including a link to your state’s registration website or to a nonpartisan partner if your state doesn’t have voter information readily available online. Here’s what you can expect it to look like on your phone:
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Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, first announced the voting boxes would be showing up on top of the News Feed in an open letter published on Wednesday.
Facebook says it will host more registration drives on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger this summer. The company’s goal is to help 4 million people register to vote, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a June 17th op-ed in USA Today, which would be up from the 2 million people the company says it helped register in 2016 and 2018. “People want accountability, and in a democracy the ultimate way we do that is through voting,” Zuckerberg wrote in the op-ed.
On June 17th, Facebook also launched a new “Voting Information Center,” which has information about voter registration, how to request an absentee or mail-in ballot (if that’s an option in your state), announcements and alerts from local election authorities, and more. As part of that announcement, Facebook also said it was rolling out the ability for users to to turn off “all social issue, electoral or political ads from candidates, Super PACs or other organizations that have the ‘Paid for by’ political disclaimer on them.”
