Register to Vote Clickbait Is Good

The 2018 midterm elections are a scant two weeks away, and as the number of states with not-yet-passed voter registration deadlines dwindles to a handful, an intrepid band of patriots has begun leaning on the most powerful known communications tool in a last-ditch effort to coax Americans into fulfilling their civic duty: the celebrity gossip viral tweet.

It promises tantalizing information about the heartbreaking end of a whirlwind four-month engagement between two twentysomething famous people; it delivers the splash page for a nonpartisan voter registration web site, which leads with a bold-fonted pledge to assuage the irritation of hoodwinked millennial victims: "This will take two minutes."

On Thursday, Elle magazine joined the democracy lovefest, repackaging the format with the revelation that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were splitting up. (It briefly fooled a colleague at GQ, who excitedly shared it in Slack; out of respect for this individual, who would eat cookies made from a dead man's ashes, I will not name him here.) This tweet went over less well, in small part because every good Internet joke is ruined when a brand attempts to co-opt it, and in large part because it tastelessly trades on morbid curiosity about an event that has not occurred, and casts aspersions on a relationship that is, as far as anyone knows, perfectly fine. Elle deleted its tweet and issued an apology.

I understand why tweets like these have become occasional objects of scorn. Retweeting is a lazy substitute for canvassing, or phone banking, or donating, or doing literally anything else to make a difference in the election. There's a condescending implication that the types of people who are interested in celebrity marriages are not also interested in the country's future. At a time when large swaths of the populace don't trust the media, this doesn't help. Sometimes, entertainment gossip provides a badly-needed respite from our political hellscape, and the medium needn't become an additional conduit for disseminating bad news that keeps you up at night.

Here is the thing, though: Anecdotal evidence suggests that they are working. Some people reported that they neglected to change their address since moving; others were registered, and took Pete and Ariana's non-bombshell as a friendly reminder to vote. My favorites are the people who wanted to register, and intended to register, but just hadn't followed through yet—and for whom this tweet, as one person admitted, "finally got me to stop fucking around n actually do it."

Right now, there is a package from REI sitting on my desk. It's a wedding present for a friend—tent stakes—but the dumb checkout process shipped them to me instead of him. Rationally, I understand that I have to take the affirmative step of calling the store in order to get it to the correct destination. But after six weeks, I still haven't done it. Every day, a "Call REI" reminder pops up on my phone; every day, I'm in the middle of something. Pretty soon, the returns window is going to pass, and I'm going to be stuck with the tent stakes (and no tent) forever, all because I promised myself I'd get to this three-minute task eventually.

If I were to get a text from an unknown number this afternoon, telling me that I should call immediately to obtain a rock-solid scoop about, say, where Kevin Durant is going next year, but the person who answered the phone was actually a helpful REI customer service rep, I'd be baffled, at least. Probably annoyed, too, because I was in the middle of something. But also, as long as we were on the line... I'd probably get it taken care of. Most importantly, I'd be better off for it.

After two years of unified Republican government under Donald Trump, 2018 is maybe the most consequential election of my lifetime, and all the evidence indicates that it will swing on the participation of young voters. But turnout in this demographic has always been low, especially in midterms. And even as you read this sentence, bad people are working to shrink the electorate by any means necessary: in Georgia, by shunting voters to a shady "holds" list; in North Dakota, by barring P.O. box holders from proving their eligibility using their IDs; in Georgia again, by throwing out absentee ballots after amateur handwriting analysts determine that the signature on your ballot doesn't look enough like the signature on your driver license.

On November 7, we'll be reading all about about close races and swing states that were decided by a couple hundred votes. If the price for getting a handful of procrastinators to be among them is "me being tricked by a harmless clickbait tweet for ten seconds," I'm willing to pay it.