elections

CNN recently reported on mobiles in election  monitoring -- providing real-time data from the polling stations transmitted via mobiles. The article asserts:  "The humble mobile phone is driving a new revolution which some experts hope could bring fairer elections and democracy to some African states. During the 2006 local government elections in Senegal, Radio Sud used reporters and correspondents with cell phones to call in what they saw. Many African countries have struggled against rigged elections and authoritarian rule since gaining independence last century.

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Text messaging works to get out the youth vote. Researchers from Princeton and Michigan Universities, together with the US Student Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) New Voter Project and Working Assets finally released a study of their text message mobilization efforts in the United States elections in November 2006. The fact sheet is here, the full study with the different forms of text reminders and outine of the methodology is attached.

The study found that text message reminders to new voters increased an individual’s likelihood of voting by 4.2 percentage points. This is an increase similar to "quality phone call" reminders but at a fraction of the cost, indicating that partisan and nonpartisan voter mobilization efforts need to urgently get on the mobile bandwagon.

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In the United States this election season, you’ll be able to sign up to get the results on your cell phone. The Associated Press, using technology by Crisp Wireless, will make its elections results available through mobile browsers as they report them. The AP will provide this service to news outlets that can then in turn offer it to their own audiences, much like the way the AP distributes its printed news stories.

The results that will be available include state results for all national and governor races and the results of the “Top Races” that are determined by the news outlet. Users will also be able to bookmark the races they are most interested in to more easily view the results, and the service will also show national trends and the latest political news stories reported by the AP.

This is the first national effort by a news agency to provide election results to mobile phones and it will be interesting to see how it is received. There’s no doubt that all lessons learned will be put to use for far more mobile outreach in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. You can test out the service at AP Mobile Elections and read more about it in this press release.