US's record youth vote

Voters under 30 traditionally tend to vote similarly to those over 30, MSNBC reports. Not in this election. "Young voters preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by 68% to 30% - the highest share of the youth vote obtained by any candidate since exit polls began reporting results by age in 1976," MSNBC cites CIRCLE (a non-partisan organization that promotes research on the political engagement of Americans 15-25) as saying. "Early reports" are indicating that this election's youth turnout exceeded that of 2004, "which was itself a year with a big surge in voters ages 18 to 29," according to MSNBC. Rock the Vote, too, says it's seeing a record youth turnout this year. It worked with Facebook to register 50,000+ new voters this year, ZDNET reports. Among other developments, "just after midnight on Nov. 4, about 1 million people used the Causes application to simultaneously set their Facebook status with a unified message to remind their friends to vote. Facebook is calling it one of the largest online rallies in history, with more than 1.5 million people participating." As for election-related Internet use overall, ZDNET reports that around the time Obama was being declared the winner, "an Internet usage record was being broken." Citing Akamai figures, it adds that "at the peak, there were more than 8.5 million visitors per minute visiting news sites around the globe - with more than 7.5 million of those visits occurring from Web connections in North America."

Virtual presidential elections: Kid picks

This is a great way to do voter education. Kids' virtual world Dizzywood.com's "candidates" are Kat De Claw, promising to "rebuild the road from Wildwood Forest to Canal City," and Cecil Sideshuffle, promising to "put an end to the evil Emperor Withering's corruption.” Kidzui, the kids' version of the Web, presents cartoon-y versions of Barack Obama and John McCain and their running mates. Dizzywood's 8-to-12-year-old users register, campaign for their candidates, poll and vote in a special election in-world. They learn critical thinking and "the importance of participating in real-world civic activities," Dizzywood says (they can also find virtual posters and t-shirts at the De Claw and Sideshuffle campaign headquarters). At Kidzui, virtual voting results, interestingly, are matching a recent Gallup poll for the "real world" election: Kidzui members favor Obama by a 10% margin, with Obama at 52% and McCain at 42%. "In addition to befriending their favorite presidential candidates, KidZui lets kids view each candidate’s profile page, which includes [candidates'] sites, videos and pictures," Kidzui reports. Older youth show very different preferences: In Facebook, 78% favor Obama and 22% McCain; in MySpace, Obama's at 81% and McCain 19%, Kidzui says.

Register to vote on Xbox Live?!

Thanks to a partnership between Rock the Vote and Microsoft, registration in Xbox Live started this week, the BBC reports. Having also worked with MySpace to grow the number of youth voting, Rock the Vote aims to register 2 million voters via the Xbox gaming community by this fall. The BBC adds that Xbox Live had 12 million subscribers in 26 countries by last May (the latest figure available). Incidentally, someone in our ConnectSafely forum asked about parental controls for Xbox Live; here's the link I gave him to Microsoft's page on "Family Settings" for the gaming community.