By Michael Frost

Special to The Sentinel

Thanks to student volunteers on the University of Maryland's College Park campus, 650 people received text messages on Aug. 7 reminding them to register to vote.

Volunteers spent the afternoon asking peers to contact their friends as part of the "Text the Vote" campaign, which was the beginning of an intensive effort to register young voters for the 2008 election.

"We can make a difference," said Lauren Jackson, who braved the hot sun while encouraging her fellow students to participate.

For the week, the non-partisan campaign helped generate 1,148 total messages, said Sarah Clader of the Maryland Student Public Interest Research Group, the sponsor of the event.

According to a recent study sponsored by the group and wireless telephone company Working Assets, young voters are "a very mobile population" and "increasingly difficult to reach by traditional campaign outreach channels."

It cited research showing that a quarter of cell-phone users under 25 did not have conventional telephones in 2006, and that "mobile-only" users were projected to reach 30 percent of the entire population by the 2008 election.

The study found that text-message reminders to new voters increased their likelihood of voting by 4.2 percentage points in the November 2006 elections. While yielding similar results, text messaging only cost $1.56 per vote generated compared to $20 for "quality" phone calls.

The ubiquity of text-messaging among college students was confirmed by University of Maryland student Nikki Yeah, who said that that was how she communicated with all her friends. She texted the reminder to her friends, but wasn't sure if the initiative would actually increase participation in the election, saying, "Everyone already knows about it."

"Text the Vote" is part of the "New Voters Project," which is designed to promote "ideas that young people care about" and make sure that politicians "reach out to them," said Clader.

Issues promoted by the group include working to end poverty, stop global warming and make college more affordable.

As an example of the latter, Campus Organizer Greg Schwab pointed to the high costs of textbooks.

Textbook companies have "basically gone unchecked," he said, despite "charging well above the profit line."

The only way that young people can make politicians act on issues like these is register to vote and make their voices heard on Election Day, he said.

Schwab said that he will be hiring student interns who will ultimately decide the best way to mobilize student voters on campus and "keep the ball rolling" in the "nonstop push" to register voters by the Oct. 15 deadline.

On Thursday, there were signs that the campaign was reaching the next generation of voters as well.

Soon after sending off her text message, Yeah received a return message from one of her friends.

"I can't vote yet," it said. "I'm only 17."

Photo by Michael Frost