A democratic mobile revolution
Published: 20 Oct 2005 20:00 BST
... recording of the president talking to election officials and turned the recording into a ring tone. The file — which Arroyo critics said showed she tampered with the vote in 2004 — topped ring-tone download charts in the country, despite threats of prosecution from the government.
A first step
The ambitions of Mobile Voter, the project of San Francisco-based Web designer Ben Rigby, are less sweeping. While mobile phone use is growing exponentially in the United States, use of text messaging is considerably lower than in many other countries, partly because the feature is more expensive — usually about 10 cents per message — than in other markets.
The Mobile Voter group is aimed at helping improve voter participation, particularly among younger people who can be difficult to reach with traditional political tools. The current campaign is aimed specifically at registering voters before a November special election called by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The registration is a several-step process. Sending a text message reading "IVOTE" to the number on the sign triggers an immediate reply asking the potential voter to send back their name and address, still using the phone's messaging function. The Chinese-American voter group will then mail voter registration forms to that address, with much of the information already filled in.
The billboards will be followed by a more personal approach, such as fliers handed out in Chinese restaurants and "bubble tea" shops popular among teens and twentysomethings, Rigby said.
"The advantage of mobile technology is that you can reach people in environments where you can't reach them by other means, in a way that's convenient and instantaneous," Rigby said.
Last year's MTV-backed Rock the Vote campaign similarly used mobile phones to solicit voter registration, but ultimately sent potential voters online to a Web site. The San Francisco project is among the first to keep interactions entirely on the mobile phone, aiming to reach potential voters that may not own a computer.
Open source, open-minded networks
Interest in this kind of campaigning is growing worldwide. A conference held late last month in Toronto brought together for the first time activists from around the world who are using mobile technology. They brainstormed new ways the medium could be used in their projects.
Attendees provided several powerful illustrations of how mobile technology can adapt to environments where Internet penetration remains low, or where traditional online communications can be difficult or dangerous. Groups told of projects using phones to monitor human rights violations against children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or to mobilise indigenous people in Argentina to block bulldozers tearing up forest land.
Developers from the United States showed off a virtual phone bank system, which uses open source Internet voice technology to transfer calls to volunteers on mobile phones. The system is presently being used to help connect recent immigrants with everyday questions to volunteers who speak their languages, but it's likely to be used for political phone-banking in the future.
"There are infrastructure barriers, but I think in the next election you will see massive use of mobile phones," said Katrin Verclas, co-director of Aspiration, a non-profit group dedicated to helping activists use new technological tools, and one of the organisers of the Toronto event.
None of this will replace politics' traditional doorbell ringing and mass media TV ads, but backers say these tools are soon likely to complement more common means of reaching out to voters.
"This is not the end-all and be-all," said Mobile Voter's Rigby, "but as one of several supporting tactics in a campaign, it can be very effective."
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