In the run-up to last November’s midterm elections, WNYC embarked on an experiment to see if we could use modern campaign tactics to get more people to vote.

We went to one six-square-block election district in the Morris Park section of the Bronx and focused all our energy trying to persuade inactive voters to go back to the polls. We picked on more than 200 voters who hadn't voted in the previous four years.

Through robo-calls, campaign literature and door-to-door canvassing, the goal was to cajole, convince and shame these people back to the polls. We called the campaign 'Just Vote Already.'

As it turned out, less than a third of registered voters in New York voted - the fewest in 72 years – ranking the state among the bottom four in the country.

But in this tiny election district in the Bronx, the results were promising.

Of the 219 inactive voters, 23 went to polls for the first time in four years, an increase of 10 percent. Of course, overall turnout in the district was a measly 24 percent, the same as the rest of the city.

Donald Green, a professor at Columbia University and the author of several comprehensive studies on voter outreach and participation, said we needed a control group to determine whether the increase in Morris Park was due to our campaign or something else. 

So we compared our election district to the neighboring districts. Green said that would give us “meso-level control group purity.”  

As it turns out, we beat each of the seven neighboring districts – by a margin of five to 10 percentage points.