She registered 85% of her senior class, then made it a national operation
New Voters, started by Jahnavi Rao as a high school junior, trains students to register their classmates.
Registering to vote is a form, a stamp and a deadline. For a high school senior, it is also a thing nobody ever quite gets around to. Jahnavi Rao decided to be the person who got around to it.
“I started New Voters when I was a junior in high school to register my senior class to vote,” Rao writes on the organization’s site. NBC News reports that as a senior in 2017 she registered 85% of the eligible voters at her school. That result turned a school project into a nonprofit.
The method has not changed much, which is why it travels. New Voters equips students to run nonpartisan registration drives at their own high schools, where the organizers know the hallways and the lunch schedule. Rao told NBC the conversation starts with a question: “What do you care about?”
By NBC’s August 2024 count, the group had signed up more than 80,000 students across 400 schools in 39 states since 2018, working with over 2,000 student drive leaders and volunteers. Individual drives can be large. NBC profiled one student, Jessie Cai, who registered 186 classmates, and another, Collin Wang, whose five drives registered more than 300.
The organization has also grown a research arm. The New Voters Research Network, launched in early 2022, pairs students with researchers, and about a dozen projects were running when NBC visited. A separate collaborative links 30 organizations that serve high schools. “The ultimate goal of the collaborative is to support voter registration at every high school in the country,” Rao told NBC.
The audience is not trivial. NBC notes that about 8 million young people became newly eligible to vote in 2024, and that in the 2022 midterms people aged 18 to 29 cast 12% of ballots while making up about 18% of the electorate. It also reports that about 39% of high school graduates do not go on to college, which is why a school hallway reaches people a campus drive never will.
The group describes itself as student-led, a registered 501(c)(3), with a team of more than 50 students, over 90% of them under 20. Its pitch to donors is a number: $5 registers one student.
Rao is now past high school age, which is the point. She built something that does not need her to be a senior.
