Pledging to vote on your social feeds might seem like a gimmick, but the data proves otherwise. "About 340,000 extra people turned out to vote in the 2010 US congressional elections because of a single election-day Facebook message, estimate researchers who ran an experiment involving 61 million users of the social network."

The study, which was published in the science journal Nature, found that people who saw a "I voted today" badge on their social feeds were 0.4% more likely to head to the polls than those who did not. 

You can pledge to vote on Facebook here. 

Need motivation to vote? Here are 10 memes that make the case why you should not sit on the sidelines in 2014. 

Congress really does matter.

Because they lack the sex appeal of presidential elections, the Midterms get less attention. The media prefer presidential elections because, well, they’re more fun. So media outlets cover the Midterm Elections with less fervor. It’s also much harder to put together a coherent narrative for an election of 435 seats in the House and 36 in the Senate where you don’t also have the president on the ballot to be the star atop the Christmas tree. We’re drawn to stories about individuals, and the Midterms are really a story of a group. But the rub is that the Midterm Elections are possibly as important as presidential elections. Why? Because Congress is arguably as powerful as the president. Give me three paragraphs to tell a quick story:

2009-2010:

Democrats control both houses of Congress. Obama gets stuff done. Passes a huge Health Care law, the biggest economic stimulus in history, an overhaul of regulations on Wall Street, and anti-discrimination protections for women in the work place. The president hits most of his campaign promises, missing climate change legislation, which passed the House and died in the Senate.

2011-2014:

Republicans control the House after a huge win in the 2010 Midterm Elections. They block everything they don’t like and attempt to enact their own agenda through brinksmanship over the budget and the debt ceiling. But, for the most, part, nothing really happens in Congress. So, no matter how you look at it, Congress matters quite a bit. If you’re a Republican, your party’s win in 2010 effectively ended Barack Obama’s domestic agenda. If you’re a Democrat -- and you understand how this all works -- you realize that Barack Obama’s speeches and/or backroom cajoling cannot change the fact that Republicans have a veto of the president via their control of the House.

Learn more about the midterm elections here.

Learn about the 11 most competitive Senate races here.