Los Angeles Times
October 31, 2004 Sunday
Home Edition

VOTING;
Stars, Sex and Gimmickry;
Vampire slayers, strippers, lowriders want to lure you into the booth

by Ben Wasserstein, Ben Wasserstein is a writer in New York.

Last week, Ashton Kutcher took a break from canoodling with Demi Moore
to appear with Sen. John Edwards in Iowa and Minnesota. Each time the
“Dude, Where’s My Car?” dude charged President Bush with punking the
citizenry, receptive crowds reportedly shouted back, “True dat!”

Meanwhile, Bad Boy rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’ understated “Vote or
Die!” slogan echoes through the battleground states he’s been touring.
“If you talking about flexing your power, and you ain’t flexing in the
swing states, then you ain’t flexing your power,” he told Associated
Press.

Reluctant voters have nowhere to hide these days, as Bruce
Springsteen’s “Vote for Change” tour prods them, the country musicians
of “Your Country, Your Vote” spur them and less-heralded acts use every
manner of crackpot stunt to wheedle relentlessly.

This summer’s “Just Vote” tour, for example, was powered not by
baby-boom rockers but vegetable oil, as Bay Area bands Aphrodesia and
Rock Me Pony chased down unregistered slackers in a van fueled by used
corn and soybean grease. The Armenian National Committee of America’s
pro-John Kerry tour seeks to wring votes from people with names ending
in “ian.” In the swing state of New Mexico — which George W. Bush lost
in 2000 by only 366 votes — caravans of “lowriders” will accompany
coveted Latino voters to the polls. And in Florida, transvestites have
launched a “Drag Out the Vote” campaign.

Many organizations are exporting people and ideas from solidly red or
blue states into those of a less-certain shade. For example, the
Downtown for Democracy political action committee, or D4D, is sending
hip, young New Yorkers by van to Ohio, disseminating “free designer
T-shirts, free drinks, political art and music.” New York magazine
summarized the pros and cons of D4D’s approach: “Advantages: Free
designer T-shirts, free drinks. Disadvantages: Political art and
music.”

Democrats and Republicans kicked more traditional get-out-the-vote
efforts into overdrive after the too-close vote of 2000. But if the
election is decided by a narrow margin, the media’s post-victory
spotlights are not likely to fall on the church, club and union
stalwarts who nag door-to-door or by phone bank.

Credit will more likely go to fans of the much-missed TV show “Buffy
the Vampire Slayer” who rallied voters and raised money for Kerry at a
multi-venue event they called “High Stakes” — the stake being Buffy’s
bloodsucker-killing weapon of choice.

Donald P. Green, director of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy
Studies and coauthor with Alan S. Gerber of “Get Out the Vote: How to
Increase Voter Turnout,” says that face-to-face interactions are the
key to pumping up poll attendance. “I don’t know that making a
spectacle of it gets people to participate,” he said.

Such thinking has not deflated vote wranglers’ enthusiasm for sex and
celebrity tactics. Leonardo Di Caprio, who plays billionaire Howard
Hughes in an upcoming film, joins Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas in
trying to guilt voters to the polls as part of MTV’s “Rock the Vote.”
Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” is doing
the same for the evangelical “Redeem the Vote” effort. Singer Sheryl
Crow is fronting for the feminist “Get Our Her Vote.” And P. Diddy and
Ted Nugent are getting out votes for, well, the Burger King Corp. —
Slogan: “Have it your way Nov. 2.”

The “Baring Witness” campaign encourages men and women to spell out
pro-voting messages with their naked bodies. Strip clubs nationwide
have asked patrons to avert their eyes long enough to register. And the
group Votergasm encourages people to withhold sex from nonvoters for a
week after the election.

When vote encouragement becomes so frenzied, illegal tactics inevitably
come to light. And it is inevitable that fingers point to Michael
Moore. In a tour of Michigan colleges, the filmmaker offered gifts of
clean underwear and ramen noodles in exchange for promises to vote.
Because it is illegal to pay people to vote in a federal election, the
Michigan GOP urged authorities to take Moore down. A local prosecutor
demurred, suggesting her time would be better spent “prosecuting those
who are delivering cocaine to our young people rather than underwear.”

Not that a crack-for-votes campaign is out of the question. An Ohio
sheriff has reported that an NAACP National Voter Fund worker admitted
that she paid a 22-year-old in crack cocaine for the 130 completed
voter forms he supplied. Those forms came to the sheriff’s attention
because many sported false addresses and the names of Mary Poppins,
Brett Favre, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dick Tracy and other people who do not
reside in Toledo.

So there it is. By hook or by crook, more voters than usual will
probably turn up this year. Harder to gauge: How many were lured by
lowriders, how many by lite rockers, how many by lap dancers and, in
places like Toledo, how many actually exist.