A machine learning approach to predict young voter enthusiasm based on non-political factors

Abstract

The right to vote is considered to be the backbone of democracy. As we are entering the third decade of 21st century more and more countries around the world are adopting the democratic government system. One of most important element of democratic country is the power vested in the common people and one of the way the people are expected to exercise this power is to elect a qualified candidate to lead their country. The only way to make this election process effective is to make sure everybody participates in the process. The people who are eligible to participate in this election process to elect a candidate are called ”voters”. A substantial amount of these voters are young voter or voters who have newly been registered. It has been noticed that young voters in most of the countries are reluctant to participate in the voting process. There are many social, psychological and other non-political factors behind this reluctance. This research seeks to find those factors that motivates or repels a young voter to participate in the voting process. Besides finding the factors this research will also try to determine whether a young voter is likely to vote in an election or not based on those factors mentioned before. The data set of this research was prepared by surveying via Google Forms. Later the data set was analyzed to find out the reasons behind their participation. RFECV was used to select the optimum features and later Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boosting and Naive Bayes were used to predict voter participation based on the set of optimum features. In such an experimental setup Extreme Gradient Boosting and Support Vector Machine with a Gaussian kernel has shown more promising results than the other aforementioned models. The aim of this research is to predict whether a young voter will participate in the voting process or not and find the reasons behind it so, that maximum voter turnout can be ensured and perfect democracy can be achieved.