Getting Out The Vote with Help From Custom Software

Back in a different era—the early ‘00s—a group of recent college grads founded the get out the vote machine New Era Colorado. You might recognize some of their names: Joe Negeuse, Leslie Herod, Lisa Kauffman, and Steve Fenberg. New Era’s mission is to engage, educate, and train active young leaders in Colorado. 

Every year New Era engages directly with tens of thousands of young people to get out the vote, but back in the day helping peeps update their voter registration through the Secretary of State’s (SoS) behemoth of a website was proving to be a significant barrier to participation. 

Enter Dojo4 and the power of custom software solutions. After they waved us over from the Boulder office, which happens to be across the street, we worked with New Era’s incredible staff to create https://www.registerincolorado.org/. At the time of its creation, Register in Colorado provided a nifty, über-simple UI that accessed the SoS’s API to extract data from and send data back to the SoS’ voter registration database, enabling anyone to update their registration without having to navigate the SoS’ less user-friendly interface. 

A lot has changed since then. Joe Neguse is the U.S. Congressman for Colorado’s 2nd District. Steve Fenberg is Boulder’s State Senator. Leslie Herod is also in Colorado’s State Legislature, representing the 8th District. Lisa Kaufmann is Governor Polis’ Chief of Staff. Registerincolorado.org works a bit differently today as well, due to changes in the SoS’ API, but our partnership with New Era and respect for their work remains the same.