BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Over the last few months computers have become central to learning for students like Nikka Makhani, who is a junior in high school. 

“Everything is online. Everything is on Zoom for us for the most part,” said Makhani.

Makhani and her classmates — Eitan Prins-Trachtenberg and Hannah Taheri — attend Brentwood School, and in October, they were issued a challenge.

“They asked us to come up with an idea to increase voter turnout,” said Taheri.

The idea quickly took on a life of its own. They decided to go above and beyond what their school had asked for, and bring the project to life.

Taheri, who has experience working on political campaigns, said that within days The Ballot Project had a website and a strategy in place.

“Our idea was to create flyers and basically spread them all over Los Angeles so that everyone would see it, especially in places where younger people hangout” said Taheri.

The flyers had QR codes which would take people straight to their website where links could be found to register to vote. They distributed the flyers from Culver City to West Hollywood.

Prins-Trachtenberg, who built the website, was able to track their success. 

“Around 1,000 people have scanned our QR code in Los Angeles, which is really good. We expected it to be lower than that, but it blew our expectations,” he said.

They also blew other’s expectations too.

“When people see our website and they go ‘oh you made that? No way,’ that is really cool to me. On the outside we look like three teenagers and it’s kind of unimaginable that we could make a campaign that is this good,” said Prins-Trachtenberg.

But they’re just getting started.

“Right now I’m editing graphics to post to Instagram where we’re going to link an information slide-show about the Georgia Senate runoff race so they can access it,” said Makhani.

The computers and online schooling giving them the time and flexibility they need to take on a project like this.

The group won their school challenge.