SAN DIEGO — Are you getting bombarded with political texts? Is your mailbox filled with flyers promoting different measures and candidates? Election day is now just two weeks away and the hard push for last minute votes is on!
“Mail works,” says USD Associate Professor Nikki Usher. “People open their mail. They check it. And especially if it's just a postcard or flyer where there is so much other media competing for people's attention, something that just cuts through in the most simple way is actually amazingly effective.”
But younger voters can be tougher to reach through the mail, which leads us to all those text messages voters across the county are getting.
“For all the voters not checking their mail, they're certainly checking their phone every six seconds and so one of the things that we know is that campaigns are remarkably effective at texting us,” Nikki said.
Nikki adds that texting is too new to know if it's really effective for a candidate, but the texts do seem to remind people to vote. “If they do get us out to vote, I actually think it's probably good for democracy,” Nikki said.
But are those texts legal? According to the FCC's rules for political campaign calls and texts, “campaign calls and texts are exempt from the do not call list.” That said, they are not exempt from robocall laws, so “political text messages can be sent without the intended recipient's prior consent if the message's sender does not use autodialing technology to send such texts and instead manually dials them.”
Regardless of whether or not you look at the mailers or texts, Nikki says do your own homework too. Make sure you really understand the issues and then don't forget to cast your ballot. “Voting is the single most important way that people can participate in democracy and everybody who is eligible should go out and do it,” Nikki said.
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