Group strives to boost youth turnout at polls

ORONO – Their very name suggests they’re a tough crowd.

Their posters, which feature the Statue of Liberty brandishing a baseball bat, erase any remaining doubt.

But members of the League of Pissed Off Voters, despite the group’s provocative name, say they are more concerned than angry about the state of the youth political movement.

“No one’s paying attention to us,” said Hannah Kates-Goldman, a 19-year-old from Bangor who was one of about 30 people to gather around a table at Pat’s Pizza to listen to the group’s organizers and, of course, eat some pie.

“People need to have the feeling that the people representing them are listening to them,” she said.

Members of this group -which has the mission to motivate young voters in battleground states – describe their potential political influence as “cool” and recruit members at concerts and art shows.

But they also create voter guides, endorse candidates and register thousands of young voters, whom past elections suggest are among the least likely of the electorate to cast their ballots on Election Day.

At the Orono meeting’s outset, just five people sat on one end of a table stretching half the length of the restaurant’s Red Room. The two large pizzas ordered by the groups’ organizers seemed more than enough as the small crowd was dwarfed by a child’s birthday party at the next table.

But before long, the crowd – pulled in by posters in Bangor and Orono – began to build, two more pizzas were ordered and Justin Alfond, the group’s 29-year-old organizer in New England, had to stand at the end of the table to be heard.

“Does the voter guide thing sound cool or not cool?” he loudly asked the group, whose members eagerly scribbled their e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers on a sign-up sheet of potential volunteers.

Alfond earlier went out of his way to tell the group that Lady Liberty’s baseball bat on the group’s literature is symbolic of swinging an election, not of any violent intentions of the group, formally known as the League of Independent Voters.

The league joins other youth voting movements – both partisan and nonpartisan – such as MTV’s mainstay Choose or Lose and the relatively recent niche group, PunkVoter.com.

If history is any indication, all the groups, including the league, could have their work cut out for them.

The percentage of voters between 18 and 29 in presidential elections has declined steadily since 1972, when 58 percent of young people, many concerned with the continuing Vietnam War, showed up at the polls.

An exception to the downward trend came in 1992, when Bill Clinton helped mobilize the youth vote by appearing on MTV and the then-popular Arsenio Hall show.

Jim Melcher, a political scientist at the University of Maine at Farmington, said war – this time in Iraq – could again be an issue that would bring more young voters to the polls in 2004.

“There’s some anxiety about jobs, but people are paying attention to the war,” Melcher said, predicting the issue, among young voters anyway, likely would favor Democrat John Kerry.

“It’s a wild card, though,” Melcher added. “There could be young people out there with buddies serving in Iraq thinking they need to support the president.”

The league, which has 70 chapters in the 16 swing states, is officially non-partisan, but tends to lean to the left, listing among its allies such groups as America Coming Together and America Votes, both of which have been publicly critical of Bush.

At its last meeting, the Portland branch endorsed Kerry as well as the defeat of the so-called Palesky tax cap that will appear on the Maine ballot.

While Kates-Goldman said she would be voting for Kerry, albeit somewhat reluctantly, her 19-year-old friend Thom Barrows said he was dissatisfied with all the candidates – including independent Ralph Nader – and would vote only in the local elections.

“They don’t represent anything I stand for,” Barrows said.

On the Web: www.indyvoter.org.