When it comes to using their phones to vote, U.S. wireless subscribers are generally limited to American Idol contestants like Ruben Studdard or Clay Aiken. But that may be changing.
SMS has become a vital campaign tool for grass-roots organizations, political parties and candidates in Africa, Asia and Europe. Text messaging has played a major role in recent elections in Ethiopia, Italy and Malaysia, and mobile messaging proved crucial in the 2004 Spanish election that saw the Socialist Labor Party score an upset win.
Last month, the Swiss town of Bulach held what’s believed to be the first-ever election using mobile phones. More than 11 percent of the electorate used a handset to cast their votes, while an additional 26 percent voted over the Internet. Voters used PIN codes that were sent via traditional mail as well as their birthdate to weigh in on a proposed traffic issue.
“The vote went smoothly, like Swiss clockwork,” said the mayor, according to Swissinfo.
While over-the-phone voting may be decades away for U.S. consumers, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization allowed would-be voters to use their mobile phones to obtain voter-registration materials in advance of last week’s elections. Mobile Voter teamed with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee to put up billboards around the city encouraging citizens to send a short code to request registration forms, which were then sent via traditional mail.
Mobile Voter also sends SMS reminders on election days to voters who’ve registered through the service, and plans to use teams of roving volunteers in the city’s densely populated areas to promote the offering.
“We saw an opportunity to get youth involved in civics, particularly via technology that is very familiar with them,” said Ben Rigby, who co-founded Mobile Voter in January 2004. “We have a back-end system that processes (requests), we have a database, and we send out (registration) forms ourselves.”
Each billboard has a different short code, allowing the project to monitor traffic from each location, and Mobile Voter requires full names and addresses from each user. The project plans to track turnout from last week’s California elections to determine the project’s efficacy.
Rigby originally aimed to allow citizens to register directly over their phones but discovered that the process requires a signature, effectively prohibiting registering via SMS.
“The carriers have a user signature on file, and that’s good enough for a (wireless) purchase,” Rigby said. “Why is that not good enough for voter registration? It turns out that the law is a little bit Kafkaesque at this point.”
And while Rigby hopes changes in regulations eventually allow users to register to vote on their phones, he knows that U.S. voters won’t be electing officials over their phones anytime soon. While some nations are embracing new technologies on election day-Estonia last week looked to become the first nation in the world to open its local elections to Internet voting on a nationwide level-U.S. voters seem skeptical of using computers or mobile phones to cast their votes. A recent poll from the Tarrance Group found only 31 percent of U.S. adults were interested in voting online, and it’s likely computer-based voting would have to gain substantial traction before users warmed to texting in their votes.
“There’s a bunch of advocacy that would need to happen,” said Rigby. “I spoke with somebody in the secretary of state’s office. He was like, `Oh yeah, cool idea.’ It didn’t get very far.”
