How to Make Voting a Habit? Listen to Your Past Self

The presidential election is days away, and you may be one of millions of Americans receiving calls, texts, or letters from strangers imploring you to vote. But what if one of those messages came from a more familiar source—your past self? A message written in your own words, reminding you why being, and staying, civically engaged matters. 

For many of us, civic motivations ebb and flow. A heated election cycle might inspire a surge of interest and activity, but that energy fades as soon as the political moment passes. When the next election rolls around, we may struggle to rekindle our earlier motivations—or even notice the election—especially if no high-profile races are on the ballot. 

Our inconsistent motivations around voting are understandable. For one, elections are spaced far apart, making it hard to form a habit around voting. Imagine going to the gym once every few years—there’s little chance it would ever become routine. Additionally, many of us look to campaigns and candidates to convince us not just whom to vote for but why we should vote at all. This can be especially true for younger generations, for whom a sense of civic duty is less common compared to older voters. In a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 86 percent of people over 65 said voting was essential to being a good citizen, but among those aged 18 to 29, that number plummeted to just 47 percent. Without a deeper, ongoing reason to participate, our connection to voting can fade quickly after an election ends. 

Recognizing that engagement tends to fizzle over time, my team and I at ideas42, in partnership with Vote.org, wanted to create a way to help voters sustain their civic participation from one election to the next. In 2020, we developed the Civic Action Time Capsule, a tool that enables people to capture and share their civic motivation at its peak with their future selves. When we opened the capsule two years later, we found that exposing people to their past responses led to significant increases in turnout. Helping people connect their civic intentions across election years was enough to meaningfully reduce fluctuations in engagement. 

Recognizing that civic engagement tends to fizzle over time, we developed the Civic Action Time Capsule, a tool that enables people to capture and share their civic motivation at its peak with their future selves.

In 2020, the timing for creating the capsule seemed ideal. Civic activity in the United States was reaching historic levels. Local aid groups that formed during the pandemic, the protests following the tragic murder of George Floyd, and the highly charged presidential election created the conditions for a record number of people to be civically engaged on multiple fronts. In December of that year, Vote.org piloted the time capsule with a portion of their network, prompting two thousand people to write a note to their future selves.

How does the time capsule work? Through a short, online form, participants are asked to share what inspires their experiences voting, protesting, donating, or volunteering. These personal responses are then emailed back to them two years later, along with a prompt to vote in the upcoming election. In my own message, I captured the feeling of taking my toddler with me to vote for the first time. Those words served as a useful reminder to turn that experience into a budding tradition. On November 5th, my now kindergartner and I are heading to the polls once again, but this time with my two-year-old daughter in tow.  

The power of the capsule is that it’s personal—a message from yourself is hard to ignore. And few things are more motivating than reading your own words on why something matters. Some might vote again because they are reminded of the importance of staying civically engaged; others might feel compelled to act simply to reduce the cognitive dissonance of ignoring their earlier intentions. It’s harder to stay home when that means having to contend with why a past motivation no longer holds true.

Above: Questions from the Civic Action Time Capsule. You can record your own note for your future self here, and it will be emailed to you in advance of the 2026 election.

By 2022, it was time to “open” the capsule. In collaboration with researchers at UCLA, we randomly assigned half of the participants to receive their responses one month prior to the midterm elections. To see if timing mattered, we decided to send the other half their responses a few days before Election Day, giving them a much shorter runway to form and act on voting intentions. The results were striking: Voting records revealed that participants who received their capsule responses a month before were up to 6.8 percentage points more likely to vote than those who received their response later.

The effect was especially pronounced among participants who expressed satisfaction with their level of civic engagement in 2020, suggesting that motivations from the past can in fact be carried forward. These early results, however,  indicate that people may need sufficient time to spring back into action.

This finding underscores a deep truth: we are often our own best motivators. Political campaigns, the media, and civic organizations inundate us with reasons why we should vote a certain way and what we should care about. While these are certainly helpful, the sheer volume of external messaging means we can lose sight of our own motivations to vote. The capsule helps preserve our personal connections to why we care, which can break through all the outside noise and help us sustain our engagement over time. The capsule creates a bridge—linking one moment of civic engagement to another.

In my own message, I captured the feeling of taking my toddler with me to vote for the first time. Those words served as a useful reminder to turn that experience into a budding tradition.

As we near the 2024 presidential election, we, along with Vote.org and UCLA, have redeployed the Civic Action Time Capsule. This time we’re also testing a new approach: encouraging people to fill out their time capsules early, giving them the space to reflect on their motivations and intentions prior to Election Day. We hope that by thinking actively about the future, what we call prospective reflection, voters can deepen their motivation to turn out this year and in 2026. We’ll also be capturing people’s responses after election day for those who didn’t have a chance to fill it out prior. 

Civic motivations can be shaky. But they don’t have to be. With a little foresight and a tool like the Civic Action Time Capsule, we can preserve them for the moments that matter. We encourage you to add your reflections to the capsule before it closes at the end of the year.

Together, we can turn voting from an inconsistent act into a habit—one that endures through the years, the candidates, and the ballot measures. Our future selves are counting on it.


Disclosure: Omar Parbhoo is a member of ideas42 which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.