9 Ultimate Hacks to Increase Voter Turnout in Any Election

When you are spending too much time promoting your political campaign, a bit more effort in Get Out to Vote (GOTV) drives can bring you exciting results.

Near elections, you need to give your voters a final morale boost that would help them in reaching polling stations.

The importance of higher voter turnout in democracy is uncontested these days. Voting rights advocates have adopted various strategies to boost voter turnout in recent times.

However, as a political candidate seeking a public office, you have a responsibility as well for how you bring the greatest number of people to polling stations.

Even at times when voter suppression is high in many countries, some simple tricks can help you get important deciding votes that would go to waste otherwise.

GOTV is a long-lasting process that is scattered over three primary phases, pre-election day, election day, and post-election day.

Let’s see each one in detail.

Get Out to Vote strategies are multi-pronged, so you have to get aware of all the pre-election day tactics as well to optimize your campaign as much as possible.

Pre-Election

The pre-election day of the GOTV campaign primarily starts a week before the actual polling. You have to take care of the following things to make events happen in real-life scenarios.

Rely on Emailing Strategy

Through data collected in your campaign, you have to target the voters by sending emails to them, reinforcing the need to go and vote for the sake of democracy.

Through these emails, you need to tell them the actual reason why their vote matters so that they can build a personal connection with your campaign and go to vote for you.

As election day nears, this strategy becomes more and more critical, so you have to do it consistently, starting one week before the voting day.

Targeted Canvassing

By one week before elections, you would probably know who is going to vote for you and which area still requires canvassing.

In every election, there are always some undecided voters who can be persuaded even one day before elections.

You have to measure these potential voters over the course of your campaign to do targeted canvassing to them just before elections.

These undecided voters hold the key to your success, so this step must not be missed if you want to reach your desired office.

When election time is near, it is recommended to take your PR game to a next level, so that more and more people can be inspired through your message, ultimately helping you achieve higher voter turnout.

Time to Rely on Public Relations

One week before your elections is your last time to canvass for your campaign. This is the time when you need your connections that have been built over time.

Leverage your public relations immediately and use influence marketing to bring people out to vote at this stage.

Most of the time, election canvassing would be stopped at least one day before elections, so do not delay this step for the sake of your campaign.

Phone banking and mobile texts are the prominent ways through which you can uplift your GOTV strategy when election days are near.

Phone Banking and Texts

While phone banking and text messages should be your everlasting partner during all of your campaign journeys, just before elections, its importance increases manifold to increase voter turnout.

Send powerful messages to the potentially undecided voters overtime during this week, along with emails, so that at least some of them can be convinced by the election day.

Election Day Get Out to Vote Strategies

Equip Your Political Stalls Properly

The last thing you could imagine is your empty stall on the polling site when your competitor is setting it up with zest and zeal for them.

Ensure that all of your stalls outside the polling booths are properly resourced and no shortage of manpower exists.

This way, your campaign members or volunteers could help the incoming voters and increasing the turnout in your favor.

A Two-team Strategy

You have to have at least two teams working on polling day. One team should be present at the polling station, while the other should conduct GOTV.

When you have well-organized data, you should be able to access which part of the public has already voted and which part is still left.

The polling station team would communicate this data from polling stations to the GOTV team. With this, the GOTV team would do their tricks to bring the remaining voters to polling stations.

However, this step requires fast communication services having central data management technologies, which can only be fulfilled using a canvassing app or tool.

Give Your Voters a Ride to Polling Stations

Based on your resources available, you can run public transport on election day from voters’ houses to polling stations.

This is one of the widely used tactics in third-world countries where voters struggle to reach polling stations due to the lack of transport available to them, so candidates give them rides to the polls.

Sending thank you emails to your voters is crucial, so that they can have an emotional connection with your political campaign.

Post-Election Day GOTV Tactics

Sending Your Voters a Thank You Email

Never forget to send a thank-you note to your voters who came in big numbers and voted for you. They will likely remember this as a goodwill gesture, which will help them coming back to vote in the next election.

Update Your Data for the Next Election

Right after the election day is over, the work for your next election cycle starts. While you celebrate your victory or mourn the loss, never forget to analyze the data to see how many people did not come to vote. This way, you can update your list of undecided voters to target them in the next elections.

Final Thoughts

Go to Vote drives are extremely crucial if you want to make a big difference in your election results.

Everyone understands the importance of higher voter turnout, and this is one of the reasons why governments have introduced compulsory voting systems in various countries.

Seeing the drastic consequences of low voter turnout, all political campaigns should strive to bring the most people out of their houses for optimizing their campaigns.

Never ignore the importance of early voting in this regard, as GOTV operations in early voting should be pursued as eagerly as in the normal voting routine.