RU a Txt Votr? Text Messaging Registers Young Latinos

SAN FRANCISCO--The numbers are in, and the drive to register a million new voters after massive immigrants' rights marches earlier this year came up short. But most analysts missed an experimental and successful registration process that sought to engage young Latino voters a la "American Idol." Using cell phone text messaging technology and online networking sites like MySpace, young voters reached out to other young voters via the digital maze that now dominates communication among the 35-and-under crowd.

"We actually started shopping this around last December, and everyone kept saying, 'No. There's a digital divide, Latinos aren't online,'" says Maria Teresa Petersen, executive director of Voto Latino, "I said, 'Are you kidding me?'" The non-partisan, youth-driven organization partnered with Mobile Voter, which developed the text messaging voter technology, to launch the first of its kind voter-registration drive in the United States. "Our efforts were vindicated when all of a sudden on March 23 all these kids started marching and CNN was scrambling to figure out how they started organizing and how they were doing it: Myspace and text messaging."

It's called viral, peer-to-peer communication, Petersen says, and corporate America figured it out a long time ago. Petersen left the corporate world and put to use what she'd learned.

The voting potential among young Latinos is huge, Petersen says. "Fifty-thousand young Latinos turn 18 every month in the United States, 87 percent of whom are eligible to vote," she says. Young Latinos are the country's fastest growing demographic; 34 percent of Latinos are under age 18. A Pew Research study on cell phone usage found that 54 percent of cell phone-owning Latinos use text messaging, compared to 31 percent of whites. Nearly half of the 43 million U.S. Latinos are online.

"Five years ago I didn't have a cell phone. Five years ago the freshmen here didn't have a cell phone. But four years ago they did. Four years ago I did," says Emmanuel Pleitez, a Stanford University senior and Voto Latino volunteer who is attached to dozens of online listserves. Pleitez has a profile on the popular college networking site Facebook as well as MySpace, where he urges friends and acquaintances to register to vote. "If hanging out happens online, we need to figure out how to "hang out" and target those 'hanging out' places online," he says.

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