Cost of Door-to-Door Canvassing is $19 Per Vote, Research Finds

A new book financed in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts is helping foundations and charities figure

out how best to spend money to persuade a higher percentage of Americans to vote this November.

Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, two Yale University political scientists, say that research by them and other scholars, synthesized in the book Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout, shows that door-to-door canvassing of potential voters is the most effective way to ensure greater participation in elections. Their cost-benefit analysis found that progressively less effective strategies are leafleting, direct mail, and phone calls by volunteers or by paid workers. Automated phone calls and mass e-mail messages trail the list, having virtually no effect on voting.

“The take-home message is that quality matters,” says Mr. Green. “High-quality contacts are unusually effective, much more so than relatively perfunctory or impersonal contacts.”

Labor unions, churches, and community groups can use the information, he says, to help decide where to allocate their get-out-the-vote dollars for maximum effect.

“Before this line of experimental research took root, it was anyone’s guess whether money was best spent on phone calls, door-to-door visits, direct mail, or e-mail,” Mr. Green says. “Now we have a clear sense of the strengths and weaknesses of each. This allows campaigns going forward to form realistic expectations about the results they will achieve.”

‘Trade-Offs’

The findings do not mean that campaigns should put all their money into face-to-face canvassing, however.

“There is a trade-off between quality and quantity, and often between quality and time,” Mr. Green notes. “If you need to contact a million people next week, your choices are going to be fairly limited.” The more personal the interaction, he says, the more difficult it is to reproduce on a large scale.

About 105.6 million Americans — or roughly 51 percent of the voting-age population — voted in the 2000 election, but many organizations hope to increase that figure this year.

The book, paid for in part by Pew’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, focuses on short-term tactics rather than long-term strategies, however. It does not deal with proposals designed to make voting easier or to inspire people to become more active citizens.

What’s more, it focuses on local and statewide elections; it does not measure the effectiveness of television advertising, which is used heavily in campaigns for national office.

Door-to-door canvassing yields, on average, one additional vote for every 14 people contacted, the authors report. Assuming that canvassers reach 12 people an hour and are paid $16 an hour, each additional vote costs $19.

Similar calculations show that distributing leaflets yields one extra vote for every 200 people, at a cost of $43 per vote.

Phone calls cost $35 to $200 per additional vote, while direct mail costs $59 to $200 per extra vote. E-mail and automated phone calls have no detectable effect on voting rates, the authors say.

The researchers plan to update their book every two years, says Mr. Green, as further experiments cast new light on the process. And they hope the next edition will include an evaluation of television ads.