Unveiling the Secrets on How to Increase Voter Turnout

Voter turnout is the percentage of eligible voters who actually cast a ballot. It’s also the number that determines whether everything your campaign built translates into a win. In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, turnout reached 66.8%, its highest point in over a century, according to Pew Research Center. In most midterm and local elections, it sits far lower.

The gap between registered voters and voters who actually show up isn’t random. It’s shaped by factors campaigns can directly influence: Who you contact, how often, and through which channels. This guide covers six evidence-backed strategies for how to increase voter turnout, with specific lift data for each approach.

Why don’t people vote?

A study by CIRCLE, a Tufts University initiative, found that around 20% of young people don’t think they know enough to be able to vote. The study also found that most youth don’t believe voting can effectively change society.

According to Eyal Winter, an economist at the University of Leicester in England, voting is a way of showing loyalty to your social group and its values. If a person’s social group doesn’t really care about politics, then the group members are less likely to vote.

According to a study by Survation, the largest percentage of people who did not vote in the UK in 2015 did so because they thought their beliefs were not represented by the parties in the election.

In summary, the most common reasons for not voting include:

• They don’t think it makes a difference
• A Complex voter registration process
• They don’t like the candidate or campaign issues
• They are too busy or have conflicting schedules

Let’s see some strategies you can use to address these issues and learn how to increase voter turnout.

Why is voter turnout so low?

Voter turnout stays low for two different kinds of reasons, and they call for two different fixes: Structural barriers that make voting logistically harder for specific groups, and behavioral barriers that make eligible voters who could vote easily choose not to.

Structural barriers show up before a voter ever reaches the ballot. The Brennan Center for Justice found that 9.1% of voting-age citizens, about 21.3 million people, lack ready access to a document proving citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, needed to satisfy ID requirements. Voters without reliable access to a car show measurably lower election-day turnout, an effect that hits young voters, voters who live far from their polling place, and voters of color hardest. Registration deadlines, polling place closures, and narrow early voting windows compound these barriers in states that haven’t adopted automatic or same-day registration.

Behavioral barriers turn out to matter more than most campaigns assume. MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky, reviewing the research on convenience voting reforms, has concluded that lowering the direct costs of voting does little on its own to increase turnout. Pew’s David Becker has made a similar point: It has never been easier for most U.S. voters to get election information and cast a ballot, yet turnout has still fallen to some of its lowest levels in decades in several recent cycles. That gap points to a motivation problem, not just a logistics problem, the same “does my vote matter” apathy this guide’s research on voter apathy covers in depth.

The practical takeaway for a campaign: A structural barrier needs a logistics fix, a ride to the polls, a registration reminder, a polling-place lookup tool. A behavioral barrier needs a relational one, a plan, a peer ask, a reason this vote matters. Most GOTV programs that stall are applying only one kind of fix to a turnout problem that has both causes running at once.

What causes higher voter turnout?

Of course, voter registration trends across most states differ yearly, and even some changes in your approach can increase voter turnout for the elected officials. However, some strategies apply regardless of these changes, including how to increase voter turnout.

Here are six strategies, backed by political science research, that hold regardless of where your campaign is running.

Help voters make a plan

People are more likely to complete a task if you can get them to visualize the process mentally. CallHub’s guide to voting plans covers the full behavioral science behind this technique.

When registered voters were asked over the phone to take a pledge to vote, followed by a series of questions that mentally guided them through the voting process, they voted at a rate of 4 percentage points higher than people who did not receive the call.

The tactic works best on eligible voters who stay alone. These voters are less likely to have a plan than people who stay in groups or families where discussing the next day’s activities is a normal part of everyday life. For someone who stays alone, rehearsing their Election Day routine with a stranger has a huge effect on their decision to cast a vote.

Questions you can ask include:

• When are you planning to vote? (“Before I drop the kids off or after I come home from work.”)
• How are you getting to the polling station? (“Should I drive my car or take the bus.”)

If you have enough volunteers, you can also hand out pledge cards that ask people to “pledge” to vote, followed by volunteers asking the above questions face to face.

How to find voters who stay alone?

Household data is hard to come by unless you use a data vendor.

The cheapest solution is to group people with the same address or landline number and exempt them from plan-making messages. While NationBuilder uses addresses to segment households, CallHub uses landline numbers.

Both these methods are useful for targeting, but their effectiveness depends on the quality of your voter data.

For high-quality data, you can use data vendors like L2 or Target Smart and import the data into CallHub for your GOTV outreach.

Quick note: This GOTV tactic works on people you have established a relationship with through at least one previous contact. If you are a non-partisan organization cold-calling or texting leads from a voter list, this strategy may not work for you.

Repeat personal contact

Voter turnout increases when you remind your voters of the day of elections. Door-to-door canvassing and phone banking are particularly effective at turning out voters, including those who haven’t voted much in the past. The personal social contact that is inherent in these two communication mediums is noted by political science experiments as the driving force inspiring people to vote.

We can note this difference through studies that pit commercial phone banks against volunteer-led phone banks. While GOTV efforts through commercial phone banks boosted voter turnout by less than 1 percent, a volunteer-led phone bank raised it by nearly 3 percentage points.

Of the contact channels studied, canvassing produces the highest lift. The Analyst Institute’s review of randomized control trials found door-to-door canvassing raises turnout by an average of 4.3 percentage points per contacted voter, compared to 2–3 points for volunteer phone banking. Peer-to-peer text messaging adds a further 0.4 to 1.0 percentage points, based on multiple peer-reviewed studies from the J-PAL network. Running all three channels in combination, targeting the same voter with repeated touchpoints across the campaign period, is the most effective approach measured to date. Campaigns building a canvassing program from scratch can start with CallHub’s door-to-door canvassing guide for GOTV.

And when these same eligible voters were contacted repeatedly over calls, outreach efforts were twice as effective at creating committed voters.

Campaigns need to shift from turnout strategies that are easily disregarded by the public to more personal and engaging channels like canvassing and phone calls. Rather than using these tactics as a one-stop strategy, they need to be consistently employed across the duration of the campaign to understand how to increase voter participation turnout effectively.

For instance, here is one way to boosting voter turnout using the repeat contact strategy: Conduct a small survey during the election period will remind people to cast their vote. Now divide your voter list into groups depending on their responses, their past behavior, and the data you have on them for your upcoming touchpoints.

Use text message GOTV to reach more voters

Text message GOTV has become one of the most cost-effective channels in a campaign’s turnout toolkit. Unlike phone banking, texts scale quickly, reach voters where they already spend time, and can be personalized at volume.

Peer-to-peer texting, where volunteers send individual texts to voters from their own phones, produces 0.4 to 1.0 percentage points of turnout lift in peer-reviewed studies. That may sound modest, but across a large voter list, a consistent lift of less than 1 point can be decisive in competitive races.

The keys to effective text GOTV are timing and personalization. Texts sent within 72 hours of election day, addressed by name, with a clear ask and a polling location link, outperform generic blast messages. Testing your message copy across smaller segments before the final send improves results.

CallHub’s peer-to-peer texting platform lets volunteers work through a contact queue, send personalized messages, and handle replies in real time, without each volunteer needing their own phone or SIM card. Your outreach team can process thousands of contacts per day while keeping the message personal. See how campaigns run text GOTV with CallHub. For ready-to-use scripts, see CallHub’s GOTV text message templates.

Exert social pressure

Get Out The Vote messages that use social pressure to motivate people to vote are effective at increasing voter turnout. Well connected people have an impact in increasing voter turnout by motivating their network to do so. Results from political science experiments during the 2006 Michigan primary elections show that when voters were reminded through a GOTV mailer that voter participation was a matter of public record and that their neighbors knew whether they voted or not, voter turnout shot up by almost 8 percent.

In a study during the 2010 general election, researchers sent out two mailers to people, with one minor difference – one mailer had the text “We may call you after the election to ask about your voting experience” at the top-right corner.

An addition that increased its effectiveness by almost 50%.

Social pressure can be put to work in multiple ways to increase voter turnout. Other successful social pressure tactics include:

1. Sending someone a letter showing their past voting history.
2. Thanking people for voting in previous elections.
3. Emphasizing that many people vote (This tactic is somewhat disputed with some campaigners still using low voter turnout and thin margins as a motivator. But multiple studies suggest otherwise, with researchers recording higher turnout with everyone-is-doing-it messages rather than don’t-be-part-of-the-problem appeals.)

While these tactics follow a softer tone, shaming tactics that use social pressure also increase voter turnout. For example, sending the message that both the voter and their neighbors would be informed about who had voted after the election increases turnout by 8 percentage points. However, Compared to the 4.6 percentage point increase when voters were told that their vote was a matter of public record, it is evident why campaigns resort to shaming tactics.

Although they’re less effective in the short run, tactics that don’t shame voters into voting create better outcomes across multiple election cycles. Shaming tactics have also resulted in backlash for campaigns, making people feel coerced into doing something.

The best practice is to frame your message so that it effectively says “we’re keeping an eye on you” rather than “we’re going to shame you if you don’t vote”.

Leverage peer pressure

Social norms rally people to go out and vote in high numbers. The motivation to adhere to social norms is even stronger when delivered as part of a message from someone within the voter’s personal network.

This method is especially effective at turning out young voters and minority communities. Getting the message to vote from a member of their community members or someone from the same college is more impactful than the same message coming from a stranger.

The hard part is finding people from a volunteer’s contact list who are part of their voting precinct. Some relational organizing tools like VoterCircle solve this by letting you match a supporter’s contact list with the voter list and filter out voters in their area.

Important note: Make sure the ask to mobilize friends and family only goes out to strong supporters. A study found that asking to mobilize neighbors deterred some people from voting.

Think of it as a product purchase. Wouldn’t you be less likely to buy the product if exposed to an optional add-on during check-out? A call to mobilize works similarly by shifting the voter’s attention from a “vote yourself” message to a “get your neighbors to vote” component, which is too big an ask for weak supporters.

Create well-informed voters

A study by Nonprofit VOTE on nonpartisan voter turnout groups found that groups who provided information about voting, including voter guides, ballot measure informational sheets, etc., were more effective at getting people out to vote. Organizations that combined voter education programs with direct outreach saw turnout rates among participants that consistently outpaced comparable populations who received no voting information. The mechanism is straightforward: A voter who knows where to go and what to bring is more likely to follow through on the decision to vote.

Creating an election-specific website will help you include all the campaign-specific information in one place. By doing so, you’re providing a central platform for people to come to learn about everything related to your election campaign.

Use social media sites to inform your potential voters about the elections, your candidate, your plans, and everything else they need to know.

Three practical steps to build a voter education program that moves turnout:

1. Create a dedicated voting FAQ page on your campaign site that answers the most common voter questions in your district: Where to vote, what ID is required, whether same-day registration is available, how to vote by mail, and what to do if a polling location has changed.
2. Send SMS voting information blasts in the final week before election day, linking directly to your FAQ page. Short, specific texts with a direct URL outperform generic reminder messages.
3. Set up a voter hotline so supporters who aren’t comfortable with texting can call for help. Older voters, first-time voters, and voters with registration questions all use this channel.

With young people ages 18 to 24, the confusion around how to cast their ballot is a deterrent to voting. Statistics Canada puts them as the group that’s least likely to vote in a provincial election.

If you can cut out that confusion, there is a higher chance people are going to vote.

Pro tip: If you are sending GOTV texts, include a contact number so people who aren’t comfortable with texting have a channel to reach out to for more information. Especially useful when you are reaching out to older voters who may not be familiar with texting.

E.g. “Have questions about voting? Call our voter hotline at 822-24-8268”.

Strike a contrast with the opponent

Many voters remain apathetic about the voting process and their involvement with it because they’re unaware of how items on a candidate’s agenda directly affect their lives.

Many others are aware of your candidate’s policy positions but still don’t turn out to vote because your messaging does not contrast with the opponent’s.

Voters who only hear one side of the story tend to believe that both candidates will enact the same policies. They need to be made aware of the distinction and how certain policy positions improve their lives while others don’t.

The strategy is particularly effective when contacting under-represented groups and swing voters to get them to see how casting the ballot in favor of your candidate can make their lives better (compared to how worse off they’d be by voting for an opponent).

Research published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review found that voters who received targeted information about policy differences between candidates were significantly more likely to turn out than those who received generic get-out-the-vote messaging. Issue-salience messaging works because it converts an abstract civic obligation into a concrete personal stake: The voter understands exactly what changes if their candidate wins or loses.

Factors that affect voter turnout

Voter turnout doesn’t rise or fall uniformly across a district. Understanding what drives participation at the individual level helps campaigns allocate outreach resources to the highest-yield segments.

The factors with the strongest documented effects on voter turnout include:

• Age: Turnout rises consistently with age, peaking among voters in their 60s and 70s. The gap is stark: In the 2022 midterms, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey found just 25.6% of voters aged 18–24 cast a ballot, compared to 64.6% of voters 65 and older, a 39-point gap. First-time voters are the hardest to turn out and respond most strongly to direct, personalized contact. See CallHub’s dedicated guide on youth voter turnout for tactics that work specifically with first-time and young voters.
• Socioeconomic status: Voters with higher income and education levels turn out at consistently higher rates, a pattern the MIT Election Data and Science Lab has documented across multiple cycles. Working-class and lower-income voters respond strongly to messaging that connects voting to concrete economic outcomes.
• Election competitiveness: Turnout is higher in competitive races. When voters perceive their ballot as consequential, they show up at higher rates.
• Ease of registration and voting: States with automatic voter registration, same-day registration, and early voting see measurably higher turnout, though MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky has found these convenience reforms alone produce a smaller lift than commonly assumed, since removing logistical friction doesn’t address a voter’s underlying motivation. Campaigns in states without these policies carry a larger burden of helping voters navigate the registration process.
• Direct personal contact: As covered in this guide, contact from a known volunteer or community member is the single most effective turnout intervention available to a campaign.

For a deeper look at the research behind each of these factors, see CallHub’s full guide on what affects voter turnout.

Turn your GOTV strategy into higher turnout

The six strategies in this guide don’t operate independently. They compound. A voter who makes a plan, receives a social pressure mailer, hears from a peer in their community, and gets a text reminder in the final 72 hours before election day is far more likely to cast a ballot than a voter who receives a single touchpoint.

Most campaigns that struggle with turnout aren’t running the wrong tactics. They’re running too few of them, too infrequently, or through channels that don’t reach their target voters. The gap between registered and actual voters is a contact and messaging problem. It has a solution.

If your campaign is looking to coordinate phone banking, peer-to-peer texting, and canvassing from a single platform, CallHub lets you run all three with shared contact lists, real-time reporting, and compliance built in. See the full GOTV tools and tactics guide or reach out to the team to set up your next campaign. For the complete phase-by-phase framework these six strategies fit into, see CallHub’s complete GOTV guide, or explore CallHub’s GOTV platform to see how calling, texting, and canvassing come together for turnout programs.

Frequently asked questions

Tony Joy

Tony works on stories at CallHub, where the customer is the protagonist, and the setting changes across politics, advocacy, and business. He shapes and builds the story arc to help them mobilize supporters, assess voter sentiment, or get citizens out to vote.