Want to vote? Text me now

[IChing]

By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: October 19, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT


On a billboard alongside a busy San Francisco boulevard, above a restaurant called "My Tofu House," a message aimed at young Asian-American voters is helping break new ground in political activism.

"Register to vote," reads the advertisement, which looks more like an ad for a hip new Nokia phone than a public service message. "Text 'IVOTE' to 80837."

The campaign, jointly produced by a new nonprofit called Mobile Voter and the city's Chinese-American Voter Education Committee, is one of the first in the United States to take the surge of political activity that has emerged around e-mail and the Web and move it wholly to the cell phones that are appearing in more and more pockets.>>>snip

"The thing that's interesting about this, particularly to political types in D.C., is that this could actually affect the bottom line of an election, which is voter turnout," said Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet. >>>>>snip

In the Philippines earlier this year, activists opposed to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took a controversial recording of the president talking to election officials and turned the recording into a ring tone. The file--which Arroyo critics said showed she tampered with the vote in 2004--topped ring-tone download charts in the country, despite threats of prosecution from the government.

http://news.com.com/Want+to+vote+Text+me+now/2100-1028_3-5900606.html?part=rss&tag=5900606&subj=news

Moderators can you move this also to activism ? it is an important article