GOTV for the Lazy: Tell Your Facebook Friends to Vote

Erik Voeten:

For those of you who didn’t hear it on NPR last night, Nature just published a fascinating study by Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler on an experiment to increase voter turnout via Facebook messages. One third of 61 million Facebook users were randomly assigned to receive a message on their Facebook profile with links to polling place information and a button to indicate to their friends that they had voted. In addition, one third of Facebook users also received information on how many of their friends had voted (a “social message”). The remaining third constituted the control group.

The results show that especially the social message had a small but significant impact on voter turnout (including verified turnout using voter rolls). Moreover, the messages did not just influence the receivers but also their friends and friends of friends.