PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — About 16 million young voters will be eligible to cast ballots in their first presidential election this year, but not all are registered to vote. To reach them, the voter engagement organization HeadCount is partnering with popular musicians.
At the Sabrina Carpenter concert Tuesday night at the Wells Fargo Center, volunteers from HeadCount will be working the crowd to check voter registration status, register new voters, sign them up for election alerts, and enlist them to text friends about participating in the election.
HeadCount volunteers will also be at the Gracie Abrams concert at The Met Philadelphia, which was postponed to Oct. 15. They’ll be at the Maggie Rogers show at Wells Fargo that same night, too.
“Our goal is to meet young voters where they are,” said Tappan Vickery, HeadCount senior director of programming and strategy.
The group partners with artists and entertainers and then enlists their fans to volunteer for voter engagement drives at concerts and festivals.
“We meet them with totally non-partisan outreach, so we’re there just to inform and empower,” she said, “and when you already have something in common like being a fan of an artist or loving live music, it makes it a lot easier to have that conversation. … It’s already a judgment-free zone.”
Young people between 18 and 24 are notoriously hard to motivate for elections, but Vickery said the group turned out in record numbers in 2020. She hopes they’ll set a new record this election.
“There were studies done in 2020 showing that young people don’t vote because nobody asked them to, and we’re out there having a peer-to-peer interaction, creating a positive space, and we know that it works,” she added.
HeadCount has already registered 350,000 new voters this year.