by LISA CHIU

More than a year before ballots are cast in the 2008 presidential election, voters younger than 30 can get text messages from presidential candidates, ask them video questions on YouTube and even download campaign ring tones to their cell phones.

Those hoping to capture the youth vote believe it’s these methods that will get more young voters to the polls, but one study has found that it might not make a difference at all.

A 2002 Pew Charitable Trust study of 3,000 voters between 18 and 24 found that increased information about political candidates and elections actually made no difference in voter turnout.

The study is a good baseline, said one of its authors, Nicholas Lovrich, because it was done in a less high-profile election year and simply tested methods to reach young voters, and not what voters thought about issues.

“It’s like pulling teeth, and there is no easy injection of something miraculous,” said Lovrich, a political science professor at Washington State University.

Edwards greets children at campaign stop
Photo courtesy of Edwards’ Campaign Flickr page

While youth voting has increased by more than 4 million between 2000 and 2004, a lot of that growth can be attributed to the overall increase in voters of all age groups, he said.

In the 2002 study, Lovrich and his colleagues followed the non-partisan organization Project Vote Smart in its efforts to educate 1,500 young voters. They also tracked a control group of the same size that did not receive information.

They expected that young voters with more information about elections would be more likely to vote, but instead found that outreach efforts had very little effect on the attitudes and behaviors of young voters. They also found that the promotion of Project Vote Smart’s Web site as a source of information also made little difference in the political knowledge on the young voters they surveyed.

The results were disheartening to Lovrich, and showed how difficult it is to craft messages that resonate with this age group. Young people have become more demanding of messages than previous generations, he said.

Lovrich said he sees the survey’s findings on an anecdotal level at WSU daily. There are free newspapers on campus, yet the only people he sees reading them are faculty and staff. Traditional ways of getting information aren’t catching on, he said.

In his 30 years of teaching, he’s witnessed a shift in the way young people learn. When he first started teaching, the majority of students were content to listen to just his words and logic. Today, multimedia is incorporated into most of his lectures.

“If you have too many words and not enough images, the percentage of engaged students goes way down,” he said. “It’s difficult to get and sustain attention without a more powerful packaging of the message. There has to be a graphic, sound, a picture – something in addition to the use of the English language.”

A lot has changed since his study was published, Lovrich said. Cell phones are now ubiquitous, Internet technology is savvier, and the war in Iraq has led to greater citizen dissatisfaction across all age groups.

In response, 2008 presidential candidates are reaching out to young voters more. Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., hired a co-founder of the social networking Web site Facebook.com and Sen. Hillary Clinton’s, D-N.Y., campaign regularly uses the video Web site YouTube.com to reach voters.

“The Obama campaign is banking on young voters,” said Dotty Lynch, a political consultant for CBS News. “He needs a big turnout of young voters in order to catch Clinton, who has greater popularity among older voters.”

Whether the increased youth vote can swing the election remains to be seen until Election Day, but that won’t stop campaigns from trying to reach it by any electronic means necessary. And while they may or may not be a swing vote now, it is possible that young voters can make a difference – when they become older, that is.

“These young voters in their teens and 20s, with their Internet habits and media consumption habits, will be your average voter one day, and that means we’re setting precedence for all future elections,” said Sara Holoubek, a New York Internet marketing consultant.