If you just can’t wait until the Iowa caucuses close at 7:30 p.m. (CST) on Jan. 3, relax. Social network MySpace is letting its U.S. voting-age members cast their ballots on Jan. 1 and 2 and expects to serve up the results hours before the first vote is taken on Jan. 3 in the Hawkeye State.
The vote, which MySpace is touting as the “First Primary,” will be hosted on the network’s Impact Channel at http://impact.myspace.com. That site also houses links to the MySpace profiles of every candidate that operates one, as well as an archive of the five MySpace/MTV candidate dialogues so far and other tools for community engagement.
MySpace voting will open at 3:01 a.m. (EST) on Tuesday ,Jan. 1 and close at 11:59 p.m. (EST) on Wednesday, Jan. 2.
News Corp.-owned MySpace also operates a “Declare Yourself” site with tools specific to encouraging political involvement among first-time voters at http://www.myspace.com/declareyourself. A MySpace-exclusive set of PSA spots there uses “Daily Show” reporter Ed Helms and Chris Mintz-Plasse (McLovin from the movie “Superbad”) to give a very tongue-in-cheek account of how democracy works.
Visitors can also find voter registration deadlines and primary dates in their state, encourage friends to come to the site or add a “Declare Yourself” badge link to their own MySpace pages.
Earlier this month, MySpace launched what it says will be monthly political opinion polls. That first online questionnaire polled U.S. respondents who will be 18 or older on Nov. 4, 2008 about their political attitudes and found that 86% consider themselves “likely” or “extremely likely” to vote in the ’08 Presidential election. Twenty-seven percent consider themselves independent of party affiliation, compared to 8% of the U.S. population as a whole.
The Dec. 13 MySpace poll also found that respondents were more politically engaged—online, at least—than the average citizen. They were 139% more likely to have visited an online chat room with candidates or public officials in the month before the poll; 29% more likely to have searched online for political information the day before the poll; and 16% more likely to have read news online.
Questions were raised about the statistical significance of that first MySpace poll, given a response of fewer than 1,000 members out of a U.S. member base of more than 70 million. MySpace defended the small sample as no less accurate than typical phone polling.
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