Facebook joins expostulate to get UK electorate to polls

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A Facebook page is seen in a welfare photo.

Credit: Reuters/Facebook/Handout

LONDON (Reuters) - British choosing officials will for the initial time have use of Facebook to inspire some-more people to register to opinion on May 6 after audience fell to ancestral lows in the last dual ballots, a watchdog pronounced on Friday.

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The Electoral Commission pronounced each caller to the amicable networking site on Saturday will be asked if they have already sealed up to vote. If not, they will be redirected to the commission"s site where they can register.

At slightest 3.5 million people unsuccessful to register for the 2001 choosing and the commission estimates there might still be millions in the same position.

Young people are in between the greatest users of Facebook, but are traditionally the hardest to convince to expel their vote.

"If you"re not registered, you can"t vote," pronounced Clinton Proud, head of campaigns at the Electoral Commission.

The series of electorate who go to the polls has depressed over the last 100 years. Turnout at the last choosing in 2005 was 61.4 percent. By contrast, audience in the early 1950s was on top of 80 percent.

It is lowest in between 18-24-year-olds, descending to 37 percent in 2005 from 39 percent at the 2001 election, according to MORI estimates.

In a inform after the 2005 vote, the watchdog blamed the low audience on the viewed similarities in between the main parties and a debate seen as "at most appropriate muted and at misfortune disastrous in tinge and as well stage-managed."

Some electorate felt their opinion would have no disproportion since "nothing will change" whoever wins, the inform added.

Younger people are less expected than comparison electorate to see going to the polls as a county duty, it said.

Richard Allan, Facebook"s executive of policy, pronounced the site had twenty-three million users in Britain, of all ages and backgrounds.

"We are thus singly placed to reach unregistered voters," he said.

Voters contingency register by Apr twenty if they wish to opinion in an choosing that polls indicate will be the tightest in twenty years.

The main parties have taken a root out of President Barack Obama"s debate and embraced email and the web in what a little are job "Britain"s initial internet election.

(Editing by Andrew Roche)

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