A phone app to register voters? Latino Vote released VoterPal to increase registrations

An innovative phone application called VoterPal, now available for all smartphones, allows users to help others to register to vote. Get-out-the-vote groups are delighted, but users must be careful to use the tool without violating Texas' restrictive voter-registration laws.

The app, launched on Wednesday by the national organization Voto Latino, simplifies the registration process by using the phone's camera to scan the registrant's driver's license, then automatically fills out a voter registration form.

The form must then be printed and mailed.

A version of this app for Apple's iOS was released this year at Austin's South by Southwest festival. An Android version is also now available.

"Based on our past rigorous findings, we know that millennials rely on peers for their political information," says Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino. "We know that 70 percent of our audience is mobile first. We know that this is a wild election when folks are feeling helpless and asking themselves what else they can do besides register to vote. So we put it all together and came up with VoterPal."

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The organization is focused on mobilizing the engagement of Latino millennials in political processes.

Kumar says the app can be used anywhere such as at schools, or a concert or in the neighborhood. She adds that "The stakes are too high, and everyone in the community is feeling it. This app gives every single person the power to be mobilized locally short of jumping on a campaign."

In Texas

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the app. Zenén Jaimes Pérez, communications director of the legal advocacy organization Texas Civil Rights Project, warns that users must be careful, when using the app, to comply with Texas' voter-registration laws.

The app, he said, "is intended to serve nationally and is usable in Texas in that an eligible voter can scan the ID card and have the technology pre-populates the form."

But Jaimes underlined that the eligible voter whose ID was scanned to populate the form "is then responsible for sending in their voter registration form to election officials."

In other words, he explained, the person helping others to register using the phone app cannot mail the form to the local registration agency unless he or she is deputized by the county or certified to register people to vote.

According to the Texas Civil Rights Project, Texas is among the states with the most restrictive voting laws in the country. According to Jaimes, people who want to volunteer in a drive to get out the vote need to be deputized, and the certification is only valid for the county in which the individual was certified.

With those precautions taken, he says, it's fine to use VoterPal.

olivia.tallet@chron.com

Twitter: @oliviaptallet