Get Out The Vote (GOTV) is the operational phase of a political campaign focused not on persuading undecided voters but on mobilizing people already identified as supporters to turn out and vote. It typically runs in the final 72 hours before Election Day, though early-voting and vote-by-mail systems have stretched the window to several weeks in many jurisdictions.
Standard GOTV tactics include door-to-door canvassing, phone banks, SMS reminders, ride-to-the-polls programs, literature drops, and increasingly, digital ad retargeting and peer-to-peer texting. Campaigns rely on a voter file — a database combining public registration records with modeled support and turnout scores — to prioritize contacts. Volunteers usually work from "walk lists" or call sheets generated for specific precincts.
Academic work has shaped modern practice. Field experiments by Alan Gerber and Donald Green at Yale, beginning with their 1998 New Haven study and summarized in Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (first edition 2004), established that in-person canvassing produces larger turnout effects per contact than direct mail or robocalls, while live phone calls and personalized messages outperform impersonal ones. Subsequent research on social pressure mailers (Gerber, Green, and Larimer, 2008) found that messages referencing a voter's public turnout history significantly boosted participation.
GOTV is distinct from voter registration drives, which expand the eligible pool, and from persuasion, which targets undecideds. It is also legally distinct from voter mobilization by third parties — in the United States, 501(c)(3) nonprofits may conduct nonpartisan GOTV but cannot favor candidates, while parties, campaigns, and 501(c)(4)s face fewer restrictions.
Outside the U.S., comparable operations exist under different labels: UK parties refer to "knocking up" on polling day, and Australian campaigns rely heavily on how-to-vote cards distributed at polling stations under the country's compulsory voting regime.
Example
In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the Biden campaign and allied groups such as the Democratic National Committee invested heavily in digital and mail-based GOTV after suspending in-person canvassing during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the Trump campaign maintained door-to-door operations.
Frequently asked questions
Persuasion tries to change how undecided or weakly committed voters will vote; GOTV assumes a supporter's preference is settled and focuses solely on getting that person to the polls.
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