Does 'Rock the Vote' Miss the Boat?

More than ever, the efforts of corporate-funded youth-oriented media like MTV's "Choose or Lose" and World Wrestling Entertainment's "Smack Down Your Vote" are part of the scenery in the televised road show of American presidential politics. But despite a steadily increasing onslaught of advertising and celebrity events, young people are more than ever refusing to participate in the electoral process.

In 2000, 18 to 30 year-olds represented 23 percent of all eligible voters, but cast only 8 percent of all votes. Those numbers are expected at best to hold steady this election season.

Does this mean that high-powered media have failed to encourage young people to vote? Or, worse still, are these appeals a sham -- a Potemkin village erected by corporate America to disguise the flaws of a dysfunctional status quo politics that systematically excludes and alienates young idealistic citizens?

The answer is, not exactly. While academics and activists engaging the problem of youth voter apathy almost universally agree that initiatives like MTV's "Choose or Lose" do very little to address the root causes of declining turnout -- or may even help keep these causes hidden -- most also agree that the situation would be worse without them.

Since its beginnings in 1990, when it was created in response to growing attempts by various censorship efforts aimed at rock artists, MTV's "Choose or Lose" initiative, working in close partnership with the non-profit organization Rock the Vote, has led a celebrity-studded effort to engage young people in the political process. Using public service announcements by such stars as Eddie Vedder, Queen Latifah, Aerosmith, R.E.M., Madonna and dozens of others, the group scored some impressive accomplishments in the early nineties.

Among other things, it led the fight to get the so-called "Motor Voter" National Voter Registration Reform Act passed, and its get-out-the-vote efforts during the 1992 presidential race were largely credited with helping reverse a decades-long decline in youth voter turnout, as the number of young voters rose by 20 percent and were a significant force behind Bill Clinton's election.

This election season, Rock the Vote stepped up its high-profile efforts to register new young voters, sponsoring a Democratic presidential debate in Boston, holding a televised "Rock the Vote" Latin Grammy party, launching an online voter registration drive, offering free Ben and Jerry ice cream giveaways and planning a series of automated celebrity phone calls to target young voters.

The goal? To register some one million new voters by the fall. "We've registered 225,000 as of May," says Jay Strell, communications director of the Rock the Vote campaign. Rock the Vote plans to raise $5.5 million from corporate, foundation and individual donors, including 7-UP, Motorola and the Pew Trust. "We need corporate partners to help us do the good work that we do," says Strell.

Strell also claims that there have been unprecedented levels of coordination between the various youth and grassroots organizations that register young voters and encourage them to turn out come Election Day. And yet, despite the show of civic-mindedness, full-time political activists often struggle to say something nice about these strategies.

"Well... [Rock the Vote] does, uh, what it does well," says Adrienne Brown of the League of Pissed-Off Voters, an innovative youth group that encourages young people to take a permanent, regular interest in politics.

"Well, MTV has its own way of doing things, I guess," says Rob Ritchie of the Center for Voting and Democracy, which like Brown's group appeals to young voters by helping them agitate for electoral reform and systematic change.

"It has a role," says Veronica De La Garza, Executive Director of YouthVote, whose coalition includes over 100 groups (among them Rock the Vote) and represents the single largest coordinated effort to get young people to register. "We need those big media organizations to get the basic message out. But they have to work hand-in-hand with other groups that are actually working on the ground."