An article today’s Washington Post notes one method that seems particularly effective in getting people to the polls — shame:
After nearly two years of political jockeying for the presidency, hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising and wall-to-wall campaign coverage in the media, nearly half of all Americans eligible to cast ballots in the presidential election may not bother to vote. Turnout for primaries, as well as local and municipal elections, often runs well below 50 percent.
Several efforts have been made in recent years to boost voter turnout in the United States, which is among the lowest in the democratic world. Campaigns run extensive registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts aimed at supporters, and authorities have eased access to polling places and offered more flexible voting rules.
Three political scientists, however, recently discovered an extraordinarily effective way to get people to vote.
Alan Gerber, Donald Green and Christopher Larimer drew up a list of more than 180,000 voters in Michigan. One group of 99,999 voters was set aside as a control group — these people just voted as they usually do. The rest were divided into four groups.
Members of one group got a letter each 11 days before a 2006 election exhorting them to vote because it was a civic duty. Members of another group received a letter saying that the researchers were studying their voting habits — the mailing said, “You are being studied.”
The third group got a letter pointing out that whether someone votes is a matter of public record — registrars maintain publicly available lists of those who show up at the polls. (Whom they vote for is a secret.) The letter went on to note whether people in the recipient’s household had voted in the 2004 presidential primary and general election.
The fourth group got a letter showing not only whether they had voted in the 2004 elections but also which of their neighbors had voted. The letter said that after the coming election, the entire neighborhood would receive another mailing that laid out — household-by-household — who had voted.
“These were the most homely pieces of direct mail in the history of direct mail,” said Green, who works at Yale University. “They were sheets of computer paper. They had no graphics and used block courier type. They are the exact opposite of the slick four-color mailings that campaigns send out.”
Homely though they were, the letters had a powerful effect. The control group’s turnout rate was slightly less than 30 percent. Among those who received the “civic pride” letter, turnout was 6 percent higher than the control group’s. Among those who were told they were being studied, it was 12 percent higher. Among those who were shown whether they had voted in the previous election, the turnout was 16 percent higher.
And telling people what everyone in the neighborhood had done the previous Election Day — and letting them know that they would be similarly informed about the current election — boosted turnout by 27 percent.
Yes, and ?
Is there really some benefit to having people whose only reason for going to the polls on Election Day is the fact that they don’t want to look bad in front of their neighbors ?
Let me just be blunt for a second.
If that’s your only reason for going to the polls, stay home. If you haven’t paid any attention to an election that’s been going on for two years and still don’t know who you’re voting for, stay home. If you’re planning on voting for a certain candidate based only on the fact that they’re good-looking, or they were endorsed by some celebrity you like, or you think they’re “cool”, stay home.
Trust me, you won’t be missed and we won’t harrass you for not coming to the polls.
