There is no doubt that this election season has been a long one, started nearly two years ago when the president filed his official election papers, and the campaigning swiftly started.  There is also no doubt that this year, even more so than in the 2008 and 2010 elections, social networks are going to play at least a minimal part of the election, its turnout, and the winner.

A study, published last week by the journal Nature, finally gives a glimpse into just how much sway social networks actually have over an election, and while the data used is from the 2010 mid-term election, its reasonable to assume that the influence of social networks is either going to remain about level, or increase.

The results of the study “suggests that a special ‘get out the vote’ message, showing each user pictures of friends who said they had already voted, generated 340,000 additional votes nationwide – whether for Democrats or Republicans, the researchers could not determine.”

On November 2, 2010 almost every Facebook user who logged into the site saw a completely nonpartisan “get out the vote” reminder waiting for them at the top of their newsfeed.  “It included a reminder that ‘today is Election Day;‘ a link to local polling places; an option to click an ‘I Voted,’ button, with a counter displaying the total number of Facebook users who had reported voting; and as many as six pictures of the member’s friends who had reported voting.”  It was this information that the study, conducted by scientists from Facebook and the University of California, San Diego, used to determine just how much influence social networks had on the election.

With 600,000 people in two randomly selected groups, one which received the “get out the vote” message and the other who did not see any voting message they were able to determine that “the message showing friends who had voted was directly responsible for 60,000 more votes nationwide and indirectly responsible for 280,000 that were spurred by friends of friends.”  This was determined by reviewing the public voter rolls and comparing those who actually voted in both groups.  Shockingly enough, the researchers found that 4% of those who had claimed to have voted actually did not.

What effect can this have on the 2012 election?  In 2008, Obama was the first candidate to heavily use technology and social networks to convince voters to elect him as president.  In 2012 social networks have become a vital source of electioneering, giving candidates the chance to expand upon their platform and increase their “street cred” when it comes to issues that are important to a new generation of tech savvy citizens.

This election is quickly shaping up to be an incredibly tight race, and while it’s been more than a decade since the 2000 election; one must remember that Bush won Florida by a margin of about 0.01% (one-hundredth of one percent) so while 340,000 votes might not seem like many, in a close race they can be the deciding few.  With so many difficulties facing the United States right now, this new generation of tech savvy citizens is quickly becoming disenfranchised – their president promised them a brighter future, and they have not witnessed that yet leaving them with voter apathy.  Too often do people say they aren’t planning on voting because their vote doesn’t matter, won’t change anything, or they don’t want to support the two party system.  Voting is what sets the US apart from nations like Myanmar, Syria, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.  Encouragement from social networks, such as the “Election Day’ reminder on Facebook could be an important tool in helping to get some of the apathetic voters to find their polling place and casting their vote for the future.