Voter Turnout Essay

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Campaigns depend heavily on the paid and volunteers to make phone calls. The need to increase voter turnout at any given election needs to be at a minimum a 3 to 5 % increase to have an attainable chance of acquiring that 50.1% to win an election. Political scientists have long stated that mobilization is the ultimate key to getting voters out to vote. Studies have been conducted to see if phone calls have any benefit in acquiring the needed votes through the use of commercial phone banks and volunteer phone callers. Many of the studies conducted use a nonpartisan method of getting the message to potential voters yet most campaigns are affiliated with a party. So much of the campaign process has become impersonal by using mass media and large …show more content…

There are several types of campaign phone calls from the mass telemarketing firms, the local volunteer and the robocalls. There is a suggestion that the phone call that is a short reminder to vote is less effective than the longer script and also that what the script is actually saying also does not have of any effect at all on voter turnout. With the many months of campaigning leading up to Election Day a household will receive multiple types of phone calls from surveys to asking if you support the candidate to reminding to vote. It has been found that calls made in the days just before the election seemed to be the most effective while calls that contact a voter multiple times have been found not to increase the voter …show more content…

There are different theories as to this that phone calls do increase the chances of voters going to the polls or that voters already going to the polls receive too many phone calls. There have been some studies that have determined that the large telemarketing companies do not increase the voter turnout when using short brief scripts. Field experiments have been studied to determine the effectiveness of phone calls and getting voters out to vote. These field experiments have offered insight into the effectiveness of unbiased estimates into the use of phone calls and if it is cost effective. The experiment studies have been conducted in both the partisan and non-partisan settings. The use of non-partisan experiments tends to result in less than desirable outcomes. This tends to be due to a couple of reasons; it is harder to motivate a potential voter when there isn’t enough information to give the potential voter a reason to vote and the use of identifying to a party adds legitimacy of the person contacting them. The other side to that is a partisan caller can create a suspicion because the caller has an agenda and that is; they’re trying to gain support for a

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