Social Networking, Young Voters, and the Elections

Here are some of the stories we are tracking concerning new media technologies and the elections.

Web hands voters power

Modern technology that enables voters to better share the experience harks back to long ago. In Colonial times, people would ride in from the settlements to vote and then wait with townfolk until the ballots were counted, says Kate Kelly, a historian who wrote Election Day: An American Holiday, An American History. With the invention of the telegraph, masses of people waiting for results would gather outside their city’s newspaper. The television age changed that. (Baltimore Sun).

The country has never seen social-networking technology come into play, particularly on the grass-roots level, as it has during this election, says Sue Barnes, a professor of communication and associate director of the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Politics and social networks: Voters make the connection.

Online social networking sites — socnets, from community blogs to YouTube — are changing how the members of this class get their news, whom they trust to provide it and how they act on it. Whatever the source, they comfortably and routinely comment on the news, reproduce it, then forward it to relatives, friends, co-workers and, yes, strangers. (Washington Post).

Directly connected Democracy

The presidential campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have taken notice of technology’s reach, using social networking Web sites to connect with tech-savvy voters.
(San Jose Mercury News).

Amid gloom, young see vote as act of hope

The candidate’s face is ubiquitous on social networking sites like Facebook.com and in YouTube videos. The campaign has relied on text messages to communicate with voters. They stumbled over the initial plan to announce the vice-presidential pick directly to supporters’ cell phones and e-mails, but found the short blurbs are an effective way to advertise early voting locations. (Associated Press).

On politics: The new republican party

Through the use of integrating social networking online into organizing volunteers at the local level through the myBarackObama.com site, the campaign has empowered individuals nationwide to create their organic, locally formed Obama campaign teams.

The technique eschews the usual top-down organization of a political campaign or state party structure, replacing it with a horizontal organization chart where volunteers have access to an incredible amount of voter identification information and Obama message points through the campaign’s social network. Wired magazine laid out the strategy in a revelatory article last week. (Nashville City Paper).

Don’t count them out: Young people register in record numbers

Young people don’t vote. At least, until now.

Today, the vote youth represents 22 percent of all eligible voters. At the same time, getting more than 9 million newly registered voters to the polls on election day to cast ballots will not necessarily be a sure thing. In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal, NBC News and MySpace survey suggests only 54% of new voters said they would definitely vote on Nov. 4. Since 2000, young voter participation has steadily increased. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) more than 6.5 million young people participated in the primaries and causes, nearly doubling voter turnout compared to the 2000 primary. According to the group Young Democrats of America, 18-to-29-year old voters will make up one=third of the electorate by 2015.

Aggressive voter registration drives aimed toward young people, changes in voter registration processes aas well as strong interest in the elections, are significant factors influencing how may 18-to-29-year-olds will vote, research suggests. At the same time, counting on the youth vote is challenging for many political campaigns. Researchers Allison Dale and Aaron Strauss found young people rely far more exclusively on mobile communications such as e-mail, text messaging, social networking, and instant messaging than older generations. Moreover, the researchers found that younger voters are more likely to respond to passive communication such as text messaging than messages sent via U.S. mail or conventional phone canvassing.

Can a strong showing of young voters at the polls tip give one candidate an edge over another?

Barack Obama is counting on it. In a recent AP-Yahoo News poll, 60 percent of youth likely to vote say they support Obama, while 33 percent will choose John McCain. Both campaigns have focused on courting the youth vote, but historically democrats hold an edge over rival parties. In the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry won 54 percent of the youth vote compared with Bush’s 45.

At Southern Oregon University, voting coalition groups have registered more than 1,300 young people since September. Across the state, youth voter turn out in 2006 was 7 percent higher than in 2000.