A nonprofit organization is tapping into Discord communities to drive voter registrations in the lead-up to Election Day 2026.
As the U.S. midterm elections on November 3 approached, the nonpartisan voter registration organization HeadCount partnered with Super League and Virtual Vote to run an audience campaign on Discord, with the goal of helping young adults in the United States check their registration status and make a plan to vote, in addition to measuring whether rewarded media in gaming communities can meaningfully impact users’ civic knowledge and participation.
HeadCount’s 2026 campaign to reach young voters through gaming is the organization’s second partnership with Super League and Virtual Vote, following a Roblox-based voter registration drive that resulted in nearly 4,000 voter registrations or status checks in 2024. This year, the organization pivoted to Discord to operate a voter drive that ran between September 28 and October 11.
“Discord is where the conversation continues before, during and after the game. Its 90 million daily active users gather around shared interests — including Roblox, Genshin Impact and Rocket League,” said Virtual Vote founder Justin Hochberg in a written interview with GamesBeat. “That community connection is what makes it compelling.”
During this year’s campaign, users across 15 communities, including Discord servers focused on Roblox, Genshin Impact, and Rocket League, were prompted to watch a short HeadCount video, earn an in-app reward, and enter a sweepstakes to win a trip to a 2027 GalaxyCon event. Some servers also promoted voter registration through a persistent Discord Event, which sat in the upper-left corner of participating Discord servers throughout the campaign. The campaign is nonpartisan and rewards users for watching the message, rather than requiring them to make a purchase or register to vote to win. In total, the campaign featured 77 dedicated Discord posts and 7 server-wide events across communities with a total of 5 million users, with individual servers ranging in size between 110,000 and 1.1 million users.
“We have a lot of relationships with server owners within the Discord community,” said Super League chief executive and Virtual Vote leader Matt Edelman in an interview with GamesBeat. “We think of them very similarly to how you think of an influencer who owns a YouTube channel; they have access to a fanbase that they’ve built and that respects them and that honors them, and we try to help them bring authentically interesting content and conversation to the members of that server.”
During the campaign, Discord events promoting HeadCount’s Discord voter registration campaign drove 175-percent higher engagement than standard Discord community posts, according to numbers shared by Super League.
“Discord is a daily habit for Gen Z gamers — a perfect place for HeadCount to engage this important next-gen audience,” said Super League executive vice president Rhiannon Apple in a press release. “Rewarded video is a comfortable and familiar advertising format to inform young people in a nonpartisan manner to check their registration and make a plan to vote.”
Virtual Vote is already looking ahead to 2028, with plans to continue reaching potential young voters via gaming through the midterms and beyond.
“We’re putting democracy in the group chat,” Hochberg said in a press release. “This election, we’re aiming to reach five million people on Discord and continue building gaming into one of the most powerful forces for voter participation by 2028.”