Text the Vote

[Commentary] Sometime between now and the convention, Sen Barack Obama (D-IL) will send a text message announcing his pick for vice president. The ploy may seem silly but it's an important part of one of Sen Obama's most under-recognized campaign efforts. The move should add thousands -- and more likely tens or hundreds of thousands -- of cellphone numbers to what is already one of the most detailed political databases ever created. A study conducted during the 2006 elections showed that text-message reminders helped increase turnout among new voters by four percentage points, at a cost of only $1.56 per vote -- much cheaper than the $20 or $30 per vote that the offline work of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking costs. For Obama, who is building his campaign around bringing in new young voters and registering minority voters, there's no more effective outreach than a text message. Obama's use of text messages could reinvent the get-out-the-vote machines used by American political campaigns just as his fund-raising from online donors upended the Clintons, who many thought controlled the most powerful Democratic money machine ever built. On Nov. 4, the Democratic nominee will need more than dollars from small donors equipped with credit cards and Internet access. He'll need a crowd -- a big one. That's why he wants your cellphone number. (Garrett M. Graff, an editor at Washingtonian magazine and a former Webmaster for Howard Dean, is the author of "The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House.")