Last month, Snapchat unveiled a new set of tools designed to encourage Snapchatters to vote in the forthcoming US Presidential election, from registration prompts to guides helping first-time voters have their say.
And those efforts are already paying off - per a new report from Axios, more than 407,000 people have registered to vote on Snapchat already, with the app planning to launch even more voter awareness tools and notifications over the coming weeks.

Such is important, particularly since Snapchat, in the past, promoted voting. Back in 2018, for a similar campaign aimed at voter turnout during the US midterm elections, approximately 450,000 Snapchatters registered to vote, while around 57% actually ended up casting their ballot.

This is about 260,000 additional votes cast through a direct effort in an app.

Of course, 260k is just a small fraction of the overall voting population in the US - in the 2016 US Presidential Election, for example, some 138 million people cast their vote, which eventually saw Donald Trump claim victory over Hilary Clinton. But the margins of victory in key seats were very slim - in most of the seats where Trump defeated Clinton, there were fewer than 200k votes separating the two.

That would indicate that mobilizing 260k more people could make a difference - and with weeks to go before the real ballot, early figures from Snapchat's newest voter effort are promising.

Could Snapchat be the app that decides the outcome?

Without a doubt, younger voters will have a much greater impact in 2020, and Snapchat has a very clear connection with younger audiences.

As the article has also noted, Snapchat still has other plans regarding voter encouragement. Former President Barack Obama is to make an appearance in a new Snapchat PSA soon. In the PSA, first-time and young voters are going to be encouraged to register to vote through the application.​ The celebrities participating along with Obama are going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, Snoop Dogg, Catherine McBroom, and Quincy Brown. Those have been part of other pushes within the app, hoping to increase participation even more.

The larger scheme of things, however, Snapchat's outreach is incredibly small - that is Snapchat today sees 238 million DAU, contrasted to Facebook's astonishing 1.79 billion DAU. Still could make it big, it could do if Snapchat got more youths to the votes, with historically low registration rates that definitely would sway to the final results.
Snap Chat is looking to play a huge part in boosting that figure and, going on early numbers, it will likely play some role in maximizing participation.