How much difference do GOTV (Get Out the Vote) campaigns actually make in affecting election outcomes?
The impact of a GOTV campaign is a function of the scale and quality of its outreach effort. Randomized experiments on the effectiveness of GOTV tactics such as door-to-door canvassing, phone calls, mail, and email suggest that the more personal a tactic is, the more effective it is. Face-to-face contact seems to be the most effective tactic, raising turnout by 7-12 percentage-points among those who are contacted. E-mail and robotic calls, on the other hand, are impersonal tactics that seem to have no detectable effect on turnout, even among those who listen to the call or open email from a campaign. Very often, campaigns confront a trade-off between quantity and quality. Robotic calls, for example, are inexpensive and therefore give a campaign the opportunity to reach very large numbers of voters. The catch is that robotic calls, mass emails, and other impersonal techniques typically have negligible effects on voter turnout. When personal contact is possible — in areas where populati
