Why You Keep Getting Creepy Emails About Your Neighbors' Voting Behavior • Minnesota Reformer

The election is less than a week away, which means it's time for those obnoxious election mailers reminding people that their voting history is part of the public record.

“We are sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to let you know who is voting and who is not, to encourage voter turnout,” some Twin Cities residents said in a mailing this week. “We will review these records after the election to determine whether or not you voted with your neighbors.”

The mailers, often from general-sounding groups like the Center for Voting Information and the Voter Participation Center, take on this vaguely threatening, chatty tone for a reason: Research has shown time and time again that it works.

The basic study on this was published in the American Political Science Review in 2008. Researchers examined the effectiveness of different election messages among people in 180,000 Michigan households during the August 2006 primary election. Households were randomly assigned to receive different mailings, with a control group receiving no mailings at all.

Voter turnout in the control group was 29.7%. People who received a flyer highlighting a general “civic duty” to vote were slightly more likely to vote, with a turnout of 31.5%. Reminding people of their own voter turnout history by listing their own voter turnout increased turnout to 34.5%.

The most effective intervention, however, was to list the voter participation histories of the house's residents – and also their neighbors. Voter turnout in this group was 37.8%, an increase of more than 8 percentage points compared to the control group.

“It is important to highlight the magnitude of these impacts,” the authors note. “The 8.1 percentage point effect is not only larger than any mail effect determined by a randomized experiment; It surpasses the impact of live telephone calls and rivals the impact of face-to-face contact with canvassers conducting voter campaigns.”

Subsequent studies have replicated and corroborated these results. Researchers have found, among other things:

The sense of unease people feel when opening one of these mailers is a big reason why they work: the messages leave an impression, as opposed to the generic calls to action that disappear into the background noise of a busy campaign.

While records of whether a person voted or not are public in many states, How The fact that they voted will never be made public. However, that hasn't stopped some groups falsely suggest otherwise.

“While we are not advocates of shaming tactics or policies, their cost-effectiveness makes them an inevitable development in political campaign art,” the authors of the 2008 study wrote.

Judging by the continued spread of these messages 16 years later, it appears that political advisers have taken the findings to heart.