By Mike Dorning
Get ready for a barrage of text messages to your cell phone the night before next election day.
A new study suggests that text messages sent on the eve of the November 2006 election significantly boosted turnout rates among younger voters.
To be sure, the study’s sponsors include a wireless telephone company that clearly has an interest in promoting text messaging: Working Assets, which describes itself as working to “connect cutting-edge communications technology – including mobile phone applications – with current political issues and non-partisan civic participation programs.”
The study’s other sponsor, Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project, works to register and turn out younger voters.
The researchers, Allison Dale and Aaron Strauss, two graduate students from the University of Michigan and Princeton University, found that text messages sent to “mostly young” new voters increased their likelihood of turning out by 4.2 percent.
The authors argue that makes it a cost-effective way to reach younger voters. The cost for sending text messages to the voters contacted in the study averaged $1.56 per additional vote cast.
The researchers sent text-message reminders to 4,000 voters randomly selected from 8,000 mostly young people who had completed voter registration applications. The others were used as a control group.
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The researchers followed up by matching their names to voting records and checking to see whether they cast votes.
Of the different messages tested, a short, to-the-point reminder was most effective, with a boost in turnout of nearly 5 percentage points, the study found.
In a follow-up survey, more than half of recipients said that the reminder was helpful; about a quarter said it was bothersome.