Facebook gets involved in voting process

With elections tomorrow, people might be curious as to which of their friends are going to vote and which are not. Thanks to a Facebook application created last week, users of the social networking site can now figure this out with just a few clicks of the mouse.

On Oct. 25, the California Democratic Party released the “Friend Out the Vote” application, which searches a user’s list of Facebook friends — with his permission — and identifies which ones are registered as Democrats but don’t vote regularly. It does this by matching friends’ names to their party registrations and voting histories, using the same strategy political parties use when it targets voters through direct mail.

“It’s no creepier than getting a piece of mail saying vote for candidate X or candidate Y,” Tenoch Flores, a spokesperson for the Democratic party, told the Los Angeles Times.

Once the list is generated, the application encourages the person using it to urge their friends to vote on Nov. 2. The friends that come up on the list of non-voters do not have to give their consent prior to being listed.

The CDP says the application could be an extremely useful tool in getting the 15.4 million voting-age Facebook users in California to cast their ballots in tomorrow’s election.