Georgia Hollister Isman is project manager for Text, Talk, Vote Akron, and Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, Ph.D., is executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. With $50,000 in support from Knight Foundation, the institute will engage young voters in nonpartisan discussions about the upcoming Akron, Ohio, mayoral election through text messaging. Photo: University of Akron campus by Shane Wynn/AkronStock.

Something magical happens when people talk to their peers about politics. They hone their ideas. They get new ones. They learn about the issues affecting their neighbors and about local politicians. The reality that politics is something we are all in together and voting is a community act becomes clear. Participants in these conversations become better informed, more connected to their community, and more likely to actually vote.

It is easy to imagine this kind of conversation happening in a barbershop or a diner among baby boomers or older voters. But it is hard to picture where and how millennials would have same kind of conversation.

Text, Talk, Vote seeks to recreate the kind of conversation your grandfather might have in a barbershop, but in a way that is confortable for young people. It creates a small group of people, who can then participate in face-to-face conversations enabled by text messages. Participants talk about what issues are important to them, how voting will make a difference and how they would like to be communicated with by their local officials. As participants text their replies and ideas, they can see what other groups of young people are talking about in real time. Anonymous data from these conversations is shared with the media and the candidates, amplifying the voices of young voters in the public debate.

In a pilot study, the results of Text, Talk, Vote were pretty awesome. More than half of participants reported gaining new ideas and perspective about politics. More importantly, of the half of participants who said they were not planning to vote before the conversation, 40 percent said just this one simple conversation made them want to vote. In the world of voter turnout, that is a huge number.

This fall the National Institute for Civil Discourse, which works to promote substantive and meaningful conversations about politics and policy all over the country, received $50,000 in support from Knight Foundation to do a larger pilot of Text, Talk, Vote in the Knight community of Akron, Ohio. The institute will work with dozens of Akron schools, community organizations and individuals to organize small, text-enabled conversations, specifically about the Akron mayoral election.

The Akron pilot is the first foray of Text, Talk, Vote into city politics. Engagement of millennials in city elections is especially important. Millennials increasing live in cities and are active participants in their culture, yet their engagement in local elections is even lower than their engagement in national ones. At the same time, many political decisions cities make now—to invest in public transit, for example—will have major impacts on young voters for decades to come. New ways of engaging millennials meaningfully on the city level are desperately needed.

At the same time, if Text, Talk, Vote proves effective at boosting turnout of young voters in Akron, it is poised to become a tool with much bigger impact as we roll it out in cities all over the country for the national election in 2016. The National Institute for Civil Discourse plans for Text, Talk, Vote to be a national campaign in 2016, focused on swing states and states where turnout is lowest, but available to everyone who wants to engage young voters in meaningful conversation about our democracy.