Encouraging Citizens to Register to Vote: A Mind Genomics Cartography of Messages to the New York Voter

The case history we present grew out of a student competition to create more effective messaging regarding voting, specifically getting people to say that they intend to register to vote. Pollsters and other political professionals often have a sense of what is important to the voter, in terms of substantive topics, such as the economy, the looming issues with health care, and so forth. There is a plethora of possible messages from which to choose, with the problem being which specific topical message for which candidate. However, the important question on the table is, in the first place, how to get people to register to vote. For the more diffuse issue of ‘voting itself ’, like the issue of ‘health maintenance itself,’ we deal with a more difficult problem. There is no pressing need, no issue to solve, no ‘pain points’ to address. Indeed, it is the exact opposite. There is an indifference to the democratic process, one that need not be explained nor studied, and whose origins are not relevant unless those origins can be marshalled to help identify an actionable solution. In other words, the general issue of ‘registering to vote’ is more difficult to understand [1]. There is no pressing fear on the part of the population. Rather, there is a creeping indifference, something which alarms a few people, but is irrelevant to many others until the consequences of such indifference destabilize the country or state or city, and the citizen’s pain begins [2]. The year-on-year decline in Research Article