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.”
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