Meeting Students Where They Are: A Field Experiment of Classroom Interventions for Voter Turnout Among College Students

ABSTRACT Objective The goal of this project is to test the effectiveness of various get‐out‐the‐vote (GOTV) strategies on college students’ propensity to vote in state and local elections. Methods We conduct a field experiment testing different types of GOTV activities at a large public university during a low salience local election. Undergraduate classes were randomly assigned to receive a short peer‐led voting presentation, emails with voting information, or no contact. Results We verified voting using the state voter file and found that students who received an in‐person presentation were 11 percentage points more likely to vote than those who received no voting encouragement from the study. We did not observe a statistically significant effect from email encouragement. Conclusion Our findings are consistent with prior literature on voter mobilization and suggest that low cost GOTV efforts, such as email campaigns, are not likely to be effective at driving student turnout.