The future of political volunteerism launched on April 3, 2010.

I’ve held off jumping into the iPad fray for the most part, waiting until I can actually buy the 3G version outright before making my own conclusions. But there was always one thing I knew the iPad could truly revolutionize- and it’s already in development.

According to Tech President via TechRepublican-

Project Vote, which describes itself as a nonpartisan organization that promotes higher voter registration rates in low-income and minority communities, announced last week that they are working on a mobile-device-friendly voter registration application, according to a press release, that will work on anything from the BlackBerry to the magical iPad.

But a magic wand it ain’t: In the release, Project Vote admits that there are only four states (Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) that allow electronic voter registration. …

Using a mobile voter registration application, a volunteer canvassing a neighborhood […] is supposed to be able to collect the information of a prospective voter right there on his iPad, then electronically transmit that information along to that state’s board of elections, or secretary of state, or whichever group is responsible for administering elections and voter registration.

Pretty impressive, no? This could truly revolutionize the way we think of political volunteerism. This has already been used in small part in several races recently- from the McDonnell to the Scott Brown race- I even was able to use a blackberry in a local special election.

However, while the Project Vote organization calls itself “a nonpartisan organization”, when you do more digging you find this little gem-

Working with our field partner, the community organization ACORN, Project Vote in 2007-2008 conducted the largest and most comprehensive voter registration drive in the history of our two organizations, a 21-state community-based operation that succeeded in collecting over 1.3 million voter registration applications.

That’s right- the same Acorn that was recently involved in the prostitution scandals, and more importantly, embroiled in the voter fraud scandals over the last few elections. Project Vote claimed responsibility for the surge in support for Obama campaign in the last election, and was also critical in the 1992 election, bringing in more than 150,000 new African American voters. While Politifact says that Project Vote is was directly an arm of ACORN in 1992, their relationship since then has been rather murky, with Project Vote defending accusations against ACORN as “absolutely false”- even as the FBI launched a probe into the allegations of fraud.

The simple truth is that it’s just a matter of time before we have an entirely paperless campaign experience. Volunteers might be able to download an application onto their own devices and head out to targeted areas near them via their GPS-enabled Google Maps service. From there, they can go door-to-door, armed with an entire visual interactive experience for constituents. Or perhaps they’ll collect names and signatures for ballot initiatives or primary ballots, showing a compelling video that leads directly into a signup form. All of this will come directly from a single paperless device that broadcasts the signature to the database instantaneously.

But what happens when this tool is first used by the same people who infamously enrolled the Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada? The potential for abuse is tremendous. This will be something Republicans need to watch carefully, as oversight on matters like this will be hard to scale. As a developer of iPhone applications, the potential excites me- I would love to have a client that would recognize the potential of such a service, but I am also concerned about the potential impact on elections when people attempt to use this for more nefarious purposes. We need to move political volunteerism into the future, but not at the cost of election fraud and manipulation.