By: Ted Johnson

In one of many messages urging young people to vote, Jessica Alba recently posed for a print ad in which she is pictured bound and gagged in shiny electrical tape, almost as if she had been kidnapped. “Only you can silence yourself,” the ad declares.

The spot was provocative enough to get attention. After it first appeared on the Internet, “tens of thousands” of new voters registered via Declare Yourself, the organization founded by Norman Lear, according to the group’s executive director, Marc Morgenstern.

These star-driven ads will be ever more prevalent as the first state voter registration deadline approaches on Oct. 4. But even as hopes rise for an unprecedented turnout among the Millennial Generation, the question still remains: Are young people really listening?

As much as the Alba ad indicates the effect of celebrities on young voters, it also shows the creative degree to which voting organizations have to bend over backward to reach the 18-to-29-year-old audience, bombarded as it is with different media and their messages.

Gone is the quick and easy 30-second spot, where a star simply stares into a camera and says, “Vote.”

Instead, there are the more elaborate campaigns, such as the one deployed by Rock the Vote in which Sheryl Crow offers a free song download and, if a fan gets three friends to register, a free album. The group HeadCount signed up tens of thousands of young voters over the spring and summer at more than 700 concerts, ranging from the Dave Matthews Band to Jack Johnson, but the group also is enlisting the musicians to send e-mail reminders about voting to their databases of fans. Quincy Jones says he has been working the phones, calling rap musicians to get them to make viral get-out-the-vote videos.

As well-intentioned as the efforts are, they are still met with skepticism over their ability to turn out the youth vote — which is notoriously hard to pin down — and the extent to which celebrities can drive participation.

In 2004, turnout among voters aged 18 to 24 climbed to 47 percent, an 11-point gain from four years earlier. But it was still well behind the turnout of the population as a whole: 64 percent.

Michael Connery, the author of “Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority,” cautions the media against placing so much emphasis on celebrities as a way to mobilize the young demographic.

“Stop reporting on ‘celebrity activism’ as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the youth vote,” he wrote. “This is a Boomer and Gen-X construction created for a broadcast TV culture of the ’80s and ’90s. Today’s young voters are interested in peer-to-peer communication and networked action.”

Connery praises the efforts of groups like HeadCount and Rock the Vote, whose labor-intensive efforts include everything but filling out the forms for young voters. Rock the Vote held a competition called demROCKcracy in which 3,000 bands on MySpace competed to register the most voters, and the bands were given widgets to place on their own websites to sign up their fans. As Connery puts it, “You are not just getting celebrities to incentivize people to vote, you are incentivizing celebrities to register their fan base.”

Rock the Vote has registered 1.6 million voters, exceeding its 2004 figures. Declare Yourself has hit about 750,000 and is on pace to surpass the 1.2 million registered four years ago.

Ever since Madonna wrapped herself in a flag for the first Rock the Vote public service announcement in 1992, it’s almost been a given that celebrities will be deployed to target younger voters, often through nonpartisan efforts. Rock the Vote’s voter drives in 1992 also included spots featuring REM, Aerosmith and Queen Latifah and helped register 350,000. That year, a trend of declining voter participation was reversed, with a 20 percent increase in youth turnout.

But Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, cautions against concluding that there’s a causal relationship — and against ignoring the influence of the candidates themselves.

“It really depends on the fertility of the field,” Gans said. “The best example is that, in 1992, Rock the Vote claimed credit for a large surge in youth turnout. But using precisely the same methodology in 1996, youth turnout was the lowest ever. … The same performers that got people to register in 1992 could not get people to register in 1996.”

Gans attributes the turnout spike in the last presidential election cycle to opposition to President Bush, even though it was not enough for John F. Kerry to defeat him.

Gans credits Barack Obama’s campaign for spurring a lot of the interest this cycle among young voters, whose participation in the primaries spiked over recent cycles. The widespread belief is that record youth turnout will help Obama, who leads John McCain in the demographic by a wide margin. A recent poll of 18-to-29-year-olds commissioned by Rock the Vote showed Obama winning 56 percent and McCain winning 29 percent, with 13 percent still undecided.

The conventional wisdom among organizations is that nothing tops the efforts of human contact, meaning that it is far more likely that a young adult will vote if someone personally recommends it.

“We hear from a lot of young people, since they are bombarded with messages, that they often turn to a trusted intermediary, including their parents,” said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which studies the involvement of young adults.

At concerts, musicians including Johnson, Matthews and Eddie Vedder have pressed audiences to sign up, and “it really sets things off,” said HeadCount’s executive director, Andy Bernstein.

It also takes an army of volunteers approaching groups of potential voters at concerts and chatting them up for a while — a much more active approach than merely standing behind a booth.

Still confounding the groups is how to reach non-college-educated young voters. Just one in 14 turned out for the primaries, compared with one in 4 among voters with some higher education, Levine notes. HeadStart and other groups such as the HipHop Caucus have been trying to reach these potential voters at concerts for the likes of Linkin Park and T.I.

“Music is a good way to reach noncollege youth, but I don’t think there is a clear mousetrap,” Bernstein said.

What is clear is that it will take a lot more than “Vote or Die” T-shirts or terse testimonials at the Emmys to get young adults to the polls.

Ted Johnson is managing editor of Variety and author of the blog Wilshire & Washington.

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