voter turnout

TXT OUT THE VOTE: Text Messaging Increases Voter Turnout

Posted by KatrinVerclas on Sep 13, 2007

Text messaging works to get out the youth vote. Researchers from Princeton and Michigan Universities, together with the US Student Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) New Voter Project and Working Assets finally released a study of their text message mobilization efforts in the United States elections in November 2006. The fact sheet is here, the full study with the different forms of text reminders and outine of the methodology is attached.

The study found that text message reminders to new voters increased an individual’s likelihood of voting by 4.2 percentage points. This is an increase similar to "quality phone call" reminders but at a fraction of the cost, indicating that partisan and nonpartisan voter mobilization efforts need to urgently get on the mobile bandwagon.