With less than a week to sign up voters in many states, registration groups have revved up their efforts to target young people where they live: on their cellphones, computers and video games.
Rock the Vote, the nation's largest youth registration group, recently launched a feature on Microsoft's Xbox 360 that allows gamers to request voter registration forms from their handsets.
And the nation's four largest nonpartisan voter registration groups have just joined forces with MySpace to launch the Ultimate College Bowl contest, including an online registration application that can be added to almost any website. Whoever signs up the most new voters will win a private concert for their school by the band Death Cab for Cutie.
It's the future of voter registration -- and it's working.
Registration among voters younger than 30 has soared. Heather Smith, executive director of Rock the Vote, said her organization has registered 2.3 million voters in the last 15 months and expects to reach 2.5 million. That's more than twice as many people as the organization registered in 2004.
"It's certainly enough people to make the difference this November," Smith said.
The number of young people going to the polls has also increased in recent years. Turnout among people younger than 30 rose by 9% from 2000 to 2004, according to U.S. Census data, more than double the increase of any other age group.
USC student Nelson Chen is one of thousands of young volunteers who are trying to make sure that trend continues. On Wednesday, that meant waking up at 6:15 a.m. and donning a bright yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the words of a voter registration website aimed at young adults, StudentVote.org.
Chen, who chairs his school's chapter of the Student Public Interest Research Group -- the oldest, largest effort to mobilize college voters -- and a handful of volunteers fanned out across campus, scrawling the Web address on chalkboards in dozens of classrooms before convening to set up for the day's Txt Out the Vote event.
It worked like this: A volunteer would ask a student passerby to send a text message to a phone number that sends a return message with instructions on how to register to vote. Then the volunteer asked the student to forward the instructions to friends. Within minutes, one volunteer could spread the message to dozens of people.
"It's a whole lot less effort from us," Chen said.
