How are voters using cell phones this election season?
This election season many campaigns and political interest groups are offering mobile apps, text alerts, and other mobile services to educate, motivate, and persuade voters. Too bad most cell-phone owning voters aren't very interested in mobile political direct outreach efforts, according to a new Pew report.
In its Mobile Politics report released today, Pew found that 88% of registered U.S. voters own a cell phone, nearly half of which are smartphones.
In general, text messaging is the most popular non-voice mobile activity. But this year only 19% of mobile-enabled registered voters have sent campaign-related text messages to people they know, and only 5% signed up to get text messages directly from campaigns or other group involved in this election.
Also, even though 45% of mobile-enabled voters use smartphone apps, only 8% use apps supplied by a campaign, party or other interest group.
Voters' most popular election-related mobile activities are reading others' political or election-related social media comments, and getting campaign or political news. Also, over a third of smartphone-owning voters have used their phone to check on the spot whether something they just heard from, or about, a candidate or the election was true.
For this report Pew surveyed over 1000 U.S. adults in September.
