Getting Out the Vote: Two simple things you can do in two minutes

Bumped. --Mike

Election Day is almost here. We’ve knocked on doors, made phone calls, registered thousands of new voters, and participated in the election process of the most important election this country has had since 1932. We’re at the home stretch, but our job is not done yet.

It’s “Get Out the Vote” time, or “GOTV”. For those of you that never heard these terms before, it refers to a category of political activity aimed at increasing the number of votes cast in an election. While we’ve registered voters, educated the public, and campaigned for Barack Obama and our local candidates, we now have to make sure that the people we talked to actually cast a ballot.

So, how do we do that? Well, there are two simple (yet effective) ways for every college democrat to help Get Out the Vote on November 4th, and they’ll only take you a few seconds to do: Sending a text message, and displaying a button.

Text messaging has become an essential tool in the everyday lives of students and is a great medium to communicate. According to results released by the Student PIRGs New Voters Project and CREDO Mobile, in cooperation with the University of Notre Dame, text message reminders sent to young voters on Super Tuesday increased turnout by 4.6 percentage points. And while in New York, Obama is leading McCain by as much as 33%, getting 4.6% more students out to the polls can be make or break for more local candidates.

Reminding a friend to vote at Hofstra University, for example, could be make or break for the great Democratic candidate Kristen McElroy.

So, we need you to Text the Vote on Election Day. We need everyone to find 5 friends, and send them a short message reminding them how important it is to vote, and that every vote counts. This won’t take up very much time, but it will have a major impact on who shows up to vote.

The other way to GOTV is as easy as changing your Facebook picture and status: it’s changing your Facebook and MySpace and other social networking pictures and status. On our website, we have several buttons and pictures for everyone to put up on their profile picture, to remind friends to also vote (You can also find these buttons and pictures on the bottom of this post) It’s very simple, but when friends see that you’ve voted, they’ll be reminded to do the same.

So, feel free to download these images, share with friends, and put up wherever you can!