Campaigners are increasingly turning to cash incentives to mobilize voters, addressing the challenge of media and platform fragmentation that makes reaching audiences at scale more difficult than ever. Notable examples include the Elon Musk-backed America PAC, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff's use of paid volunteers to text friends during his competitive 2021 runoff, and our 2024 relational organizing field test that offered paid incentives to recruit participants.
Increasing voter turnout is becoming a priority for conservatives. Under Donald Trump's evolving coalition, Republicans are becoming the party that benefits from high voter turnout—a position previously held by Democrats.
As paid incentives become more common in voter mobilization efforts, we must consider some key questions:
- Are paid incentives effective?
- Does this practice diminish the sense of civic responsibility associated with democratic participation?
- Are we cannibalizing free, volunteer-driven activity by paying supporters?
- Are paid voter contact initiatives as effective as volunteer-led efforts driven by passionate supporters?
- What happens when the incentives go away?
Incentives Work
U.S. law prohibits offering money or valuable items directly in exchange for voting in federal or state elections. Many states also ban per-registration payment on legal grounds. Consequently, incentives must be offered for related actions like contacting voters or signing petitions rather than for voting itself.
Academic researchers have studied various indirect incentives, including wages to paid mobilizers, to determine their effectiveness. In the early 2000s, paid canvassers were shown to boost turnout in local elections by 7 percentage points.
One study found that Election Day festivals with free food and live music near Democratic-leaning polling places increased turnout by 2.6 to 6.5 percentage points, with a cost-effective $28 per additional vote. However, the effectiveness of such interventions in more sparsely populated, rural precincts favorable to conservatives remains untested.
But Personal Connection Works Better
Research comparing professional call centers to volunteer outreach revealed that scripted calls from paid professionals had no impact (possibly even negative effects) on voter turnout, while more conversational, volunteer-driven calls boosted turnout by 3.8 percentage points. Though this study dates to 2000-2001 and phone calling effectiveness has since declined, the central finding persists: peer-to-peer conversations generate greater turnout impact than scripted interactions.
Our 2024 relational organizing field test demonstrated that text messages from known contacts boosted voter turnout by 8.6 percentage points, whereas messages from unknown numbers had no impact.
Strategic Implementation
Paid mobilization represents a double-edged sword–while it increases outreach quantity, interaction quality remains crucial for actual turnout impact.
Research indicates that material incentives are most effective among young people and low-income individuals. Since voting behavior is habit-forming, once established through paid incentives, the need for continued incentivization diminishes. This suggests incentives are best targeted at low-propensity voters. Importantly, experiments have not detected any backlash in the form of reduced future willingness to vote without incentives.
One possible middle ground is incentivizing volunteers with non-monetary rewards like competitions, recognition, or modest travel stipends. Additionally, paid mobilization requires careful benchmarking and rigorous accountability to prevent fraud that would undermine turnout effects.
For campaigns, the implications suggest that paid incentives and mobilization is essential for gaining broad reach, but must be combined with more personalized, volunteer-driven voter contact. Mass P2P texting, for example, can be helpful for initial voter identification work to understand individual voter’s opinions of candidates and elections, but a more personalized followup in the form of relational organizing to undecided or low propensity voters would be most effective.
Ethical Considerations
Two key ethical perspectives emerge when considering paid voter mobilization:
- Election campaigns compete not just with other candidates but with all the other activities demanding voters' time and attention. In today's world of streaming, social media, and gaming—all engineered to capture maximum attention—campaigns may need to shift the calculus for potential volunteers through incentives.
- Campaigns already spend substantial sums on voter mobilization; direct incentives simply push this spending downstream as direct-to-consumer technology becomes more widely available. Rather than paying a TV station to run an ad that subsidizes a voter's viewing experience, incentives shift that payment directly to individuals while maintaining the same objective.
Conclusion
When properly aligned and managed, incentives effectively drive scale in voter mobilization efforts. They prove most effective when targeted to low-propensity voters. However, campaigns should continue leveraging the enthusiasm and personal connections of their supporters, as traditional volunteer-based mobilization cannot be entirely replaced by paid efforts. The impact of authentic social connections and intrinsic enthusiasm—qualities that money alone cannot buy—remains significant in effective voter outreach.
