Payback

Dean tailored his words to the audience, talking up support for more Pell grants, noting that half the audience probably didn't have health care, and plugging his Democracy for America candidates, a couple of which are under 30 years old.

Yet as Dean spoke, a guy next to me took a sip from his ale and said, "I wonder if that's going to work, that whole grassroots thing?"

As do I. Rock the Vote's effort is very much appreciated, but is it effective? No matter how many miles the Rock the Vote bus travels or even how many young Deaniacs first pricked up their ears to politics last year and excitedly spawned organizing cells across the country, the facts are that, at least today, the youth don't vote. They didn't vote when they first got the chance in 1972, and the percentage hasn't changed much since. Ask the folks over at the Via Matta: It was that phantom Youth Vote in 1972 that helped delude the McGovern campaign, and the same hope for energizing a new demographic turned out to be one of the false legs on the Dean machine.

 

Yet there may be hope. Despite Dean's disappointment in Iowa, voter registration and participation among young people increased dramatically during the primary season. And as I made my way down to the floor to check out Mission of Burma, I met Michael Evans, the chief operating officer of Rock the Vote, who detailed the democratic promise of their current round of organizing.

"We've registered 400,000 new voters so far," he said — or yelled, rather — into my ear.

"And how many do you think you'll get before the election?" I yelled into his.

"A million. And that will be twice as much as last time."

 

I asked Evans if they're able to verify how many people they sign up actually vote. He said that they're now better able to both encourage participation and track it.

"Last time, everything was on paper," Evans explained. "But because we're doing it electronically, we can follow up. We have their e-mail, street address, cell-phone numbers. We'll contact them eight times before the election." Rock the Vote built its own software for online registration, and to widen the net it gave the software to over 250 youth-oriented Web sites to be featured on their pages. "And since our voter database is all electronic," Evan said, "we're also going to be able to study who votes, so we can figure out how to get them to the polls."