A recent research showed that young voters who were sent
text message reminders voted in a higher number, on the eve of the USA's Election Day 2006. Could it be all about forgetfulness?
Young people nowadays live in a completely
different environment than years before. The fact that they can be reached through some innovative ways brings
mobile phones in the center of attention, especially as the number of owners for such devices is continuously increasing.
The Student PIRGs' New Voters Project and Working Assets have cooperated with researchers from the University of Michigan and Princeton University and released a study on just how effective sending
SMS messages could be in increasing the number of voters on elections. The result of this research revealed the fact that the individual's likelihood of voting increased by 4.2 percentage points after they received reminders of doing so.
Some people do get carried away with various chores or work and simply forget to take part in the elections. There's a low chance that they set some reminders by themselves in order to take care of this duty too, which makes it extremely efficient that someone else takes care of this.
"The youth vote matters -- 18-31 year olds will represent more than one-third of the electorate by 2015, and what this study shows is that we have another powerful tool in our toolkit to turn them out to the polls", said Ellynne Bannon, Director of the Student PIRGs' New Voters Project.
This solution is supported by a large number of advantages. A quarter of Americans under the age of 25 used a mobile phone as their only telephone in the first half of 2006 and there is a possibility for this to reach 30 percent by 2008 Presidential election. At just USD 1.5 per additional vote generated, text messaging is extremely cost effective. Moreover, SMS messaging is already widely used among young people as a main form of communication.
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