Strategy Guide #1, Using Mobile Phones in Electoral and Voter Registration Campaigns

Posted by Bonnie Bogle on Oct 15, 2006

Mobile phones have enormous potential in electoral, voter registration, and election monitoring campaigns.

With close to 2.5 billion phones in circulation around the world, in many countries mobile phones are the easiest and least expensive way to communicate and are far more pervasive than the Internet.

Internationally mobile phones have been used for systematic election monitoring in Macedonia and Kenya, among women voters in Saudi Arabia, and in a number of popular uprisings in the Ukraine and South Korea. In the 2004 U.S. election, almost 10,000 people started their voter registration process through a mobile campaign. This year the U.S. based group Mobile Voter aims to register 55,000 young people to vote via their cell phones.

While the use of mobile phones in elections and voter registration campaigns is still in an experimental stage, a lot has been learned about the characteristics of successful campaigns. In this guide we will share these findings with you, along with case studies, and other information organizations can use to run their own mobile campaigns.

DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE. (Log-in required)

This guide was written by Michael Stein, a writer and Internet strategist, and edited by Katrin Verclas, the executive director of NTEN.

Read the press release.

MobileActive is a project of Green Media Toolshed. The MobileActive Strategy Guides were produced with the support of the Surdna Foundation, and in collaboreation with NTEN: Your Nonprofit Technology Community.

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