There's much more to voting than just showing up

I don't mean to namedrop, but P. Diddy is after me.

In NYC last weekend, all the midtown buildings were rimed with portraits of Mr. Combs demanding that I, on penalty of death, vote.

The ubiquitous "VOTE OR DIE!" ultimatum is part of Mr. Combs's "Citizen Change" campaign. The nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, which has teamed up with Jay-Z, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher among others, aims to make voting "cool, hot and sexy," according to their website, which sells "VOTE OR DIE!" t-shirts for a mere $30.

Similar suffrage-has-sex-appeal nonpartisan voter mobilization efforts include Rock the Vote, which plugs voting as "tres chic", MTV's affiliated "Choose or Lose: 20 Million LOUD!" campaign and Declare Yourself, which offers its own snazzy "vote" t-shirts for a bargain $20.

What's important about voting, according to P. Diddy? Well, given that it's election season, balloting is the latest fad (hence the necessity for suffrage apparel), but upright citizenship isn't quite hip enough to be attractive. Yet.

Now, P. Diddy wouldn't be the first person I'd choose to spokesperson upright citizenship, given charges of gun possession in 1999 and his utter absence at the polls since the 2000 election. No matter, says Combs. "I don't have a long history of voting. But I do have a long history of making things hot and relevant," he told The Village Voice. In other words, Combs wants to use his fame for good.

Given the shameful 36 percent turnout for voters ages 18 through 24 in 2000, Citizen Change and other nonprofits have undertaken a noble mission in mobilizing young voters to "realize their power." As for their questionable means, well golly, you can't expect fiscal policy to get gosh-darn-lazy-bum-kids-these-days up-n-votin'. Maybe that works in Australia, Belgium or Luxembourg, where voting has been mandatory for decades, but not in the USA, where we like things red, white and mostly blue.

"Sex sells" may be the truest alliterative truism of the last few decades. After all, when it comes to marketing to us younguns, sex is the new violence. Just ask votergasm.org, whose stated mission is "to encourage young people everywhere to pledge to have sex with voters on Election Night, and withhold sex from nonvoters until the next presidential election."

The problem with all this poll-vaulting, as I see it, isn't the sex. It's that voter turnout and "quality" of government aren't necessarily related.

Partisan voter mobilization programs at least implant some understanding of policy, however biased, which will theoretically generate the voter's interest in confirming or challenging that understanding.

But by marketing voting's sex appeal only, the nonpartisan vote-or-die-type groups make little effort to convince young people that there are issues that should inform their votes.

Suffrage is more of a white elephant (or, to be fair, white donkey) than P. Diddy advertises it to be. To be exercised responsibly, suffrage requires research.

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Promoting voting without promoting thinking is irresponsible. What we young people need now much more than a "voting is hot" campaign is a "political awareness is hot" campaign, even if that particular slogan does not make an aesthetically pleasing t-shirt.

"Citizen Change" makes no effort to complicate the election beyond the simplistic dichotomy we've learned from SNL and the Daily Show, that this is a presidential race between Inconsistency and Incoherence. Upon penalty of "death,"' newly registered young people are blindly voting for caricatures.

And voting because it's cool — voting in willful ignorance — is far worse than not voting at all.

While it is true that some of the other youth-voter mobilization organizations make near-attempts at rendering politics more accessible through their websites, their efforts are largely undercut by their own condescension. Just when MTV's Flash-heavy Choose or Lose site trumpets an informative, entertaining article on the presidential debates, the reader is smacked with a piece on how "Ability to Win is the Key."

Speaking of condescension, that's where you come in, dear reader, as targets of my own voting-boosts-ourself-esteem campaign. The best reason Princeton undergrads and the rest of the cognoscenti (come on, who else reads 'The Prince,' besides my mother?) have to vote is this: to make up for all the ignoramuses who are voting just because it's "hot."

Call it the Bright Man's Burden. Catherine Rampell is a sophomore from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be reached at crampell@princeton.edu.