The NYT today has a piece on how youth voter registration efforts are collecting young voters' cellphone numbers as a GOTV (get out the vote) tool, raising privacy concerns along with turnout:

"Voter registration campaigns are turning to a new weapon to combat low turnout among younger voters this November: the cellphone.

"Nonprofit groups have begun collecting the cell numbers of college-age voters as part of wider registration efforts. Their aim is to contact young people through wireless calls and text messaging to improve upon the turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds, which the Census Bureau reported was 32 percent in 2000.

While this is all a pretty smart idea (except for the privacy invasion part), it's still a one-to-many approach. Why not figure out ways of encouraging the spread of distributed turnout tools among young folks' peers, creating peer-to-peer voter networks? It'd probably be more effective, and less work.
(SmartMobs)