Obama, Romney have ways to make you vote Turnout is where precision targeting really works, says Sasha Issenberg, author of "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns." Political scientists are using the tools of behavioral economics and behavioral psychology to understand why people vote and how to enforce that habit; campaigns are building voting scores for people in their databases like the financial industry builds credit scores. Does it work? More than 1.1 million people already have voted, according to early voting statistics collated by George Mason University political scientist Michael McDonald, and plenty of them were prodded to do so without ever knowing it. We talked to Issenberg about the modern get-out-the-vote operation and who's ahead in that game, Democrats or Republicans. Q: What do we know about why people vote, and how do we know it? A: The traditional messaging from the League of Women voters was to talk about how low turnout was, so don't be part of the problem. And everything we knew from behavioral psychology was that to make an activity sound sad and lonely and unpopular was not a particularly good way to encourage other people to do what you want them to do. Q: So along came randomized controlled experiments for winning elections? A: Behavioral economics realized early on that there are things that you can control, and that gives you the ability to measure. The best experiment was done in Michigan in 2006 before the GOP primary - these two guys from Yale and one of their post-docs and this crazy direct-mail guy from East Lansing who sent out a series of letters before the election, and one of them said something like, "Dear Ann, your history as a voter is a publicly available document through the Board of Elections; here is your history as a voter. You did not vote in the mayoral election, you did not vote in the school board, and here are your neighbors" history and whether they voted. . . . There is another election coming up and we'll follow up with an update after the election. And this increased turnoutby eight percentage points. The guy who sent it got death threats. They called it social pressure. It's been demonstrated in every other aspect of human behavior. We are afraid of being outed as bad citizens. We are afraid of being shamed in front of our peers. We will adjust our actions to uphold whatever standards we uphold for our communities. Q: Is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans regarding voting, since there is also this emerging body of research into genetics and liberalism and conservatism? A: We know a lot about personality differences, but I don't think we are seeing what they call heterogeneous treatment effects among partisan lines, on the real behavior of voting. . . . However, we now in the 21st century have come to the acceptance that every other aspect of your personality or character can be shaped by genetics or heredity. Except we thought that somehow politics lived apart from that, and we were purely rational when it came to supporting the death penalty or [whether] taxes should be more evenly distributed.