The Obama campaign wants easy voter registration to be just a click away.
With this goal in mind, the campaign has launched a voter-registration Web site in an effort to make registration straightforward, actor Kal Penn and Facebook co-creator Chris Hughes said in a conference call organized by the Obama campaign last night.
Kal Penn, who has served as a visiting professor at the University, said that because Pennsylvania is projected to be one of the closest states in November, the Obama campaign is focusing on making sure students going to college in Pennsylvania know that they can register here.
He said the voter-registration laws in Pennsylvania are simple -- "you can vote where you live," meaning out-of-state students can register using their college mailing address.
Penn also discussed the launch of the campaign's voter-registration Web site, voteforchange.com, which is designed to make voter registration as simple as possible.
Hughes, who is also the online organizing director for the Obama campaign, called voteforchange.com, "the center of what we are trying to do online when it comes to voter registration."
People think of registering as a complex process, Hughes said, which is why the site aims to make registering "as simple and personalized and can be."
The campaign will also be launching a new Facebook application that will take all the functions of voteforchange.com and embed them into Facebook, according to Hughes.
This will allow Facebook users to see when their friends have gone onto voteforchange.com.
Registering college students is particularly challenging because there is a lot of misinformation going around and "folks are not sure where they are allowed to register," Penn said.
"A lot of college students are registering to vote for the first time," Hughes added. According to Hughes, the campaign's goal is to "communicate how simple it is."
The campaign is also working on non-partisan voter-registration drives, according to Penn.
