What is GOTV?
GOTV stands for get out the vote: the organized final-stretch effort that turns people who already support you into people who actually cast a ballot. This page explains the strategy, breaks down how a real GOTV campaign runs, maps the tools that power each tactic, and clears up a name collision: this site, gotv.com, is GOTV by FullPAC, an American political outreach platform, not the African television service.
- GOTV: get out the vote
- 6,000+ campaigns run
- Nonpartisan by design
What does GOTV stand for?
GOTV stands for get out the vote. It is the phrase American campaigns, parties, PACs, and civic organizations use for the work of converting support into turnout: identifying the people likely to vote for you, then making sure each one actually votes, whether by mail, early in person, or on Election Day.
The meaning is easiest to see against its opposite. A campaign spends most of the cycle on persuasion, which tries to change minds. A get out the vote campaign does not try to change anyone’s mind. It targets supporters whose only open question is whether they will show up, which is why GOTV efforts concentrate in the final weeks of a race, when persuasion has mostly stopped moving numbers and turnout decides everything.
The term is nonpartisan. Every party runs GOTV, and so do nonprofits, associations, and civic groups working to raise voter turnout generally. The strategy is the same whoever runs it; only the universe changes. Advocacy organizations run the same playbook on issues instead of candidates.
The strategy, this company, and a TV brand share the name.
Search for GOTV and you will hit three unrelated things: the turnout strategy defined above, this site, and a pay television service in Africa. Here is how they sort out.
| Get out the vote (strategy) | GOTV by FullPAC (gotv.com) | GOtv (television) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A campaign strategy: the final push that turns supporters into voters | A political outreach platform: texting, voice, voter data, digital ads, mail, AI research | Pay TV packages and decoders |
| Run by | Campaigns, parties, PACs, and civic groups of every stripe | FullPAC, a US political technology company; Nasdaq ticker GOTV reserved | MultiChoice Group |
| Where | United States elections at every level | United States | African countries |
| The connection | The strategy this page explains | Named for the strategy its tools exist to run: this site | None; the shared name is a coincidence. Their site is gotvafrica.com |
How a GOTV campaign actually works.
GOTV best practices vary less than vendors pretend. Underneath every serious get out the vote campaign, from a city council race to a statewide, is the same five-part machine, run inside the same window.
The long cycle
Persuasion
Months of changing minds. GOTV has not started yet.
Ballots drop
Early vote and ballot chase
The window opens. Bank every vote you can, weeks early.
E-3 to E-1
The final 72 hours
Highest-intensity contact of the cycle. Plans, places, hours, rides.
E-Day
Election Day
Strike as they vote. Chase whoever is left until polls close.
01
Set the vote goal
Start from arithmetic, not enthusiasm. How many votes does this race take to win, based on past turnout and this cycle's conditions? That number, minus the votes persuasion has already secured, is what the GOTV program must produce. Everything else on this list is sized against it.
02
Build the turnout universe
The GOTV universe is built from the voter file: identified supporters and high-support-score voters whose vote history says they may not show up without contact. High-propensity supporters vote anyway; contacting them wastes money. Opponents should never be in the universe at all, because reminding them to vote is paying to lose. The working document is the strike list: the roster of target voters a campaign strikes off one by one as each is confirmed to have voted. Everyone still on the list keeps getting contact; everyone struck stops costing money.
Strike list · Election Day
3 of 5 remaining- Alvarez, M.P-12Voted early
- Brooks, T.P-12Ballot returned
- Carter, J.P-14Plan: 1pm. Re-text 4pm
- Diaz, R.P-12Ride assigned
- Edwards, P.P-14Knock today
Struck voters stop costing money. Names are illustrative.
03
Chase the early vote
Wherever mail and early voting exist, the GOTV window opens weeks before Election Day. Ballot chase means tracking who has requested and returned a ballot, and contacting the ones sitting on theirs. Every vote banked early shrinks the Election Day list and frees the final days for the hardest targets.
04
Run the final 72 hours
The last three days are the highest-intensity contact of the entire cycle. The message shifts from why to how: where is your polling place, what hours is it open, when will you go, do you need a ride. Asking a voter to state a plan out loud is one of the most reliable turnout techniques in the field literature. This is also when the GOTV rally earns its keep, less for voters than for pumping energy into the volunteers doing the contact.
05
Strike as they vote
In states that publish daily voted files, yesterday's voters come off the strike list every morning, and the remaining budget and volunteer hours re-concentrate on whoever is left. A GOTV program that does not strike is spending Election Day money on people who already voted.
Which get out the vote tactics are most successful?
Decades of field experiments on voter turnout point the same direction: the more personal the contact, the more it moves turnout. That ranking, not loyalty to any one channel, is the real answer, and it is why serious GOTV campaigns layer several of these rather than picking one. Where a tactic maps to a FullPAC service, it is linked; where it does not, we say so.
Does GOTV work?
Yes, and it is one of the better-studied questions in political science. Researchers have run randomized field experiments on voter mobilization for over two decades, a literature anchored by Donald Green and Alan Gerber’s Get Out the Vote (opens in a new tab) (Brookings Institution Press). The consistent finding: personal contact raises turnout, impersonal contact raises it less, and quality beats volume. A volunteer who asks a voter to state a plan does more than any number of generic reminders, which is why volunteers are the engine of every serious program and why the best tool for volunteer GOTV is whatever keeps their strike list current while they knock, call, and text.
Door canvassing
strongest per conversation
Volunteer calls
personal, phone-speed
Peer-to-peer texting
personal at scale
Direct mail
in the house, one-way
Broadcast text and voice
whole universe in minutes
Digital ads and CTV
ambient reminders
Door-to-door canvassing
The most personal contact and, in the field literature, consistently the most effective per conversation. Also the most expensive and the hardest to scale. FullPAC does not sell canvassing: bring your field program, and voter data feeds it the universes and strike lists it runs on.
Peer-to-peer and broadcast texting
GOTV texting is the workhorse of modern turnout programs. Peer-to-peer texting puts a real person behind every conversation at a scale doors and phones cannot match, and broadcast reminders carry polling place, hours, and deadline information to the whole universe in minutes. Political texting is FullPAC’s core service; price a GOTV texting program in seconds.
Phone calls
Live volunteer calls beat recorded ones for turnout, and a mobile dialer keeps volunteers moving through the strike list instead of dialing by hand. Recorded calls and patch-throughs still earn their place for reach and for connecting voters to live help. Voice and dialer tools cover both.
Direct mail
Mail cannot converse, but it chases ballots and puts the polling place, hours, and a sample ballot physically in the house. Direct mail drops from the same targeting universes the texts and calls run on, which is the point of running it all on one voter file.
Digital ads and CTV
Impersonal, so weakest per impression, but unmatched for surrounding the deadline moments: early vote opens, ballots drop, Election Day. Digital and CTV sequenced against the outreach calendar keeps the reminder ambient while the personal channels do the converting.
Rides, logistics, and the GOTV rally
Rides to the polls remove the last practical barrier for voters who committed a plan. Rallies mostly move volunteers, and volunteers move voters. These are field operations, not products; what FullPAC contributes is the data that tells your field team whose door and whose ride matters in the final hours.
Get out the vote message examples
Effective GOTV messages share four habits: they are concrete (this polling place, these hours, this deadline), they ask the voter to make a plan rather than just urging them to vote, they name who is sending the message, and they honor opt-outs immediately. A working example for Election Day morning:
Hi Maria, it’s Alex with the Smith campaign. Today is Election Day! Your polling place at Lincoln Elementary is open until 7pm. When do you plan to go? Reply STOP to opt out.
More worked examples and the compliance rules behind them are in the 10DLC Quick Start guide.
The terms every turnout program runs on.
GOTV has a working vocabulary, and knowing it is half of reading a field plan. The short version of each term, in plain language.
- Canvassing
- Door-to-door voter contact: volunteers or paid canvassers knock on the doors of targeted voters to identify support, persuade, or turn them out. Also called blockwalking. In field experiments, canvassing is consistently the most effective voter contact per conversation, and the most expensive.
- Phone banking
- Organized calling through a voter list, usually by volunteers using a dialer that queues the next call automatically. In GOTV, phone banks confirm vote plans and offer rides; live callers outperform recorded messages for turnout. Voice and dialer tools.
- Peer-to-peer (P2P) texting
- Texting where a real person sends each message and handles the replies, which lets a campaign hold thousands of individual conversations at once. The workhorse of modern GOTV texting. Political texting.
- Voter file
- The master list of registered voters, built from state records: name, address, party registration where recorded, and which past elections each person voted in (not who they voted for, which is always secret). Every GOTV target list starts here. Voter data.
- Turnout universe
- The set of voters a GOTV program contacts: identified and likely supporters whose voting history says they may not show up without a push. Reliable voters are excluded to save money; opponents are excluded so you never fund their turnout.
- Strike list
- The working roster of GOTV targets, struck through one name at a time as each voter is confirmed to have voted. Whoever remains keeps getting contact; whoever is struck stops costing money.
- Ballot chasing
- Tracking who has requested and returned a mail or early ballot, and contacting the voters still sitting on theirs until the ballot is in. Every ballot banked early shrinks the Election Day workload.
- Ballot curing
- Fixing mail ballots that would otherwise be rejected, most often for a missing or mismatched signature. Where state law allows it, campaigns contact affected voters with instructions to cure before the deadline, recovering votes already cast.
- Vote goal
- The number of votes a campaign calculates it needs to win, based on past turnout and expected conditions. The GOTV program is sized to close the gap between that number and the votes persuasion has already secured.
- GOTV rally
- A late-cycle event, usually in the final days, built to energize volunteers and supporters for the last push rather than to persuade anyone. Its measurable output is volunteer shifts booked and vote plans made, not attendance.
- Low-propensity voter
- A registered voter whose history shows they vote rarely or only in presidential years. Low-propensity supporters are the core GOTV audience: their support is not in question, their turnout is.
The name is the strategy.
FullPAC builds the infrastructure that campaigns, PACs, and the consultants who serve them use to run get out the vote programs: the texting, calls, voter data, mail, digital, and creative mapped above, under one roof, white-label for the partner who owns the client. The company holds the gotv.com domain and has reserved the Nasdaq ticker GOTV ahead of a planned listing because turnout work is the business.
Full detail on the company is on the about page, common questions on the FAQ, and every public review, quoted in full, on the reviews page.
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