Episode 14: Helping young voters be heard with Jahnavi Rao from New Voters

Jahnavi Rao, Founder of New Voters

How can we ensure the future of this country is determined by those who'll have to live in it? We speak with Jahnavi Rao, founder of New Voters, which is a non-profit that has helped over 50,000 high school students register to vote across the nation. Jahnavi discusses her work in managing a nationwide, distributed team of volunteers who help students register and make a difference in their high school communities. Jahnavi notes how voting has begun to be politicized, although younger voters on both sides of the aisle are still excited to have their voice heard. Jahnavi talks about her personal experiences in helping students vote, offers advice on her own career, and also discusses the vaccine outreach New Voters conducted over the past year. Listen in to be inspired by the work that she and her team are doing to ensure that young voters feel heard and empowered in an ever-changing world.

Guest bio:

Following the 2016 election, Jahnavi founded New Voters as a club at her high school, where she registered over 85% of her class to vote and mobilized her peers while she herself was too young to vote.

Since then, Jahnavi and the New Voters team have grown the school club into a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit, working with high school student-leaders across America to help them host highly-successful non-partisan voter registration drives at their schools. For the 2020 election, New Voters registered 50,000 high school students across 300 high school chapters.

Outside of New Voters, Jahnavi served as the Founder and Director of High School Engagement at the Harvard Votes Challenge, Co-President of the Harvard South Asian Women's Collective, and is an active cast member of the Harvard College Opera Society. In her free time, you can find Jahnavi listening to Taylor swift and watching vine compilations.

About the podcast:

How Tech Becomes Law is a weekly public interest tech podcast about technology, public policy, and career advice. We are your co-hosts, Jinyan Zang and Dhruv Gupta. Each episode uncovers insights from leaders in government, business, journalism, and academia to highlight how technology can be built in the public interest. Interviewees discuss how technology can move society forward, what role they play in shaping this, and how students and young professionals can impact the path forward.

We are supported by the Public Interest Tech Lab. Listen to us on your podcast platform of choice. You can find us online at howtechbecomeslaw.org and on social media channels @techbecomeslaw.