Adrienne Maree Brown, a 22-year-old organizer, is a founder of the League of Pissed-Off Voters, which is working to turn out progressive youth voters in November. She's also the co-editor of the book "How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office," which tells 20 stories of young people doing peer-to-peer electoral organizing. "I think it's wonderful to have celebs come out and tell young folks to get involved, to vote -- I mean we're socialized to pay attention to them more than to each other," she writes in an e-mail. "But I think it's only part of the solution -- those motivating and often non-specific words from famous folk need to be backed up by the work we're doing on the ground."

Green points out that the overwhelming majority of voters are never contacted by a campaign volunteer or local poll worker; the very novelty of the encounter inspires more trust from a jaded young person than the most well-crafted TV spot. "When you're standing on my doorstep on a rainy day in early November, there's a factor of credibility," Green says. "I take a signal from the fact that you're telling me to do this, more than your specific message. I say, she's like me, she's telling me to go vote, and she thinks it's important enough to come out and do this. That has a powerful effect."

Brown concurs. "It's the same thing as buying a hot CD -- if a friend tells you it's hot, that means more than just seeing a poster or being told by the artist -- 'cause you trust them; they aren't trying to buy and sell you, manipulate you."

To be fair, Rock the Vote doesn't completely ignore the personal touch. In April, for example, there were 73 MTV/Rock the Vote "meetups" across the country, where small groups of three to 20 discussed the issue of terrorism. Such Internet-coordinated, in-person meetings became famous during Howard Dean's presidential campaign, which held thousands of meetups all over the country each month.

Rock the Vote currently sponsors 75 "street teams" of volunteers, led by both paid and volunteer organizers, who register voters at music venues, festivals and on college campuses. New York's team, for example, has hundreds of members, and holds events about 10 days a month, including registering voters at almost every Irving Plaza show and at Union Square's Virgin Megastore. Intrepid kids can even download a packet of materials from the Web site and set up a registration table on their own, just about anywhere. To a lesser extent, the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network uses ad hoc teams of volunteers to register voters at their traveling events.

But the emphasis, both in time and money, is on mass media, Web presence and the touring events over concentrated, local get-out-the-vote efforts. "The street team program is an engine for the media campaign," says Hans Riemer, Rock the Vote's political director. "It's underfunded -- the budget's a couple hundred thousand." That's out of Rock the Vote's total $5.5 million budget. Of the 300,000 voters Rock the Vote plans to register between now and November, the majority will be contacted around election time by e-mail, not with phone calls or visits.

The irony, says Delli Carpini, is that "it may be more economically efficient to spend a dollar for a young person's vote than an older person's." A canvassing campaign driven by young volunteers costs about $8 per new vote, versus $40 per vote for a direct-mail campaign.

A brand-new, innovative project might demonstrate once and for all the power of peer-to-peer in youth voting. The New Voters Project, a nonpartisan effort sponsored by the state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) and George Washington University, is working in six states this year using field organizers and young volunteers to register young people to vote.

Marisa DeMull, a 23-year-old working for the New Voters Project at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, N.M., hopes to involve 160 campus volunteers by election time. "Getting actual students to register other students at their own university has been incredibly successful," DeMull says. "They tell their own personal story about why they got involved and how voting is relevant to their own lives."

The New Voters plan is to eventually contact 500,000 to 750,000 18- to 24-year-olds in the final weeks before the November election, using the strategies proven by Green's research and the PIRGs' own organizing experience. When members of the 20 Million Loud Campaign visit the New Voters Project's targeted states (Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon and Wisconsin) the project will follow up on the people it registers with canvassing and phone calls.

In many ways, the New Voters Project marks a return to tactics of the late '60s and early '70s, when Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern drew on a grass-roots army of young volunteers and the youth vote promised, in vain, to turn conventional politics around. Maybe all it will take to rewrite history is for the kids to turn off their MTV and start talking to each other.

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