Get out the vote
efforts aimed at increasing the voter turnout in elections
"Get out the vote" or "getting out the vote" (GOTV) describes efforts aimed at increasing the voter turnout in elections. In countries that do not have or enforce compulsory voting, voter turnout can be low, sometimes even below a third of the eligible voter pool. GOTV efforts typically attempt to register voters, then get them to vote, by absentee ballot, early voting or election day voting. GOTV is generally not required for elections when there are effective compulsory voting systems in place, other than perhaps to register first time voters.
There are two types of GOTV efforts. The first type is general voter registration campaigns and encouragement to vote, conducted by electoral authorities or nonpartisan organizations. The second type is partisan work targeted at potential voters who are likely to vote a particular way. For partisans it may be easier and more cost effective to encourage voting by a hundred supporters who did not vote in the past, than it is to convince fifty voters to switch support from one party to the other. This situation can lead to polarized electoral politics. A 70% turnout from a party's committed base can be better than a 50 percent turnout from both committed and marginal supporters.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Get out the vote” is efforts aimed at increasing the voter turnout in elections. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through vote, efforts and aimed, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5554342. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Get out the vote” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.