Text messaging reminders to young people may increase voter turnout among the demographic by over four percent, according to a study released last week.

The night before Election Day in November 2006, researchers at Princeton and the University of Michigan in collaboration with the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project and a wireless company, Working Assets, sent text messages to more than 4,000 young voters with mobile phone numbers to remind them to vote.

The sample group was chosen at random from a pool of more than 8,000 young people who had recently registered to vote. Following the elections, all 8,000 plus records were matched against voter files to determine which of the registrants had voted and the result was a 4.2 percent higher voter turnout for those who received texts.

Professor Robert Shapiro of the Department of Political Science at Columbia said four percent “is about what other studies find for good phone mobilization but less than door-to-door get-out-the-vote canvassing.”

But Shapiro said campaigns seeking the votes of younger people should not put too much faith in this kind of effort, as it does not guarantee any party or campaign will see a spike on Election Day.
The director of the Student PIRG’s New Voters Project, Sujatha Jahagirdar said Senator Barack Obama has already said he will endorse the program.

How successful the program will be in years to come may wane if the technology is abused for its potential. “Eventually it won’t be a novelty anymore, it will become spam-texting,” Zeena Audi, CC ’10, said.

A statement released by the New Voters Project said only 23 percent of people who completed a follow-up survey after Election Day found the reminder bothersome, while 59 percent said it was helpful.