PreVote encourages registered users to invite their friends to the site with hopes more people will head to the election booths.
“When you invite your friends, they come to the website, and they enter into your community, and become engaged in that way,” Liou said.
Kennedy School Lecturer in Public Policy Marshall L. Ganz ’64-’92 praised the mobilizing power of sites such as PreVote.
“The site’s main value is to stimulate mobilization that would turn out real voters on election day. If a group of people decide to make an organized effort to cast these early votes... it could help them get an organization in shape that would turn out real voters on election day,” he said.
Ganz said PreVote does have the potential to reveal which party mobilizes supporters better but hesitated to predict how the site’s results will influence swing voters.
—Staff writer Faryl W. Ury can be reached at ury@fas.harvard.edu.