Washington state is the first to get hip to social media — and allow citizens to register to vote via Facebook.

State officials are using an app designed by Microsoft, according to this report on CNET: 

“In this age of social media and more people going online for services, this is a natural way to introduce people to online registration and leverage the power of friends on Facebook to get more people registered,” co-director of elections Shane Hamlin told the Associated Press.

The app was designed by Microsoft, which joined the collaboration with Facebook and Washington last fall. The way it works is Facebook will access users’ information, such as name and date of birth, and then users will have to fill in additional information from their driver’s license or state ID card. Hamlin told the Associated Press that Facebook would not be privy to this extra information.

Washington is one of about a dozen states that has online voter registration, which it initiated in 2008. Since then, 475,000 people have either registered to vote or changed their address via this system. 

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