Obama Election Watch

In the 2004 presidential election there were more than 2 million African Americans who were registered to vote but who did not cast a ballot.

Census statistics show that only 16 percent of nonvoting African Americans among those registered failed to vote for the reason that either they were not interested in the campaign or they did not like the candidates.

The other 84 percent of these 2 million African Americans — or 1,680,000 registered black Americans — did not vote for one of the following stated reasons:

• I was too busy.
• I was out of town.
• I forgot to vote.
• I had transportation problems.
• I am disabled and unable to get to the polls.
• The weather was bad.
• Polling place was far out of my way.

Clearly, most of the registered African Americans did not vote because making it to the polls was burdensome or difficult. This group offers a ripe field for Obama to harvest hundreds of thousands of additional votes. The weapon is the absentee ballot. Chances are that nine out of 10 blacks who choose to vote by absentee ballot will support Obama. Clearly, an effort to increase overall absentee voter turnout will be a huge plus for Obama’s election prospects.

The best strategy is to post information on obtaining absentee ballots on a state-by-state basis on BarackObama.com. A message can be sent to the entire universe of several million e-mail addresses collected by the Obama campaign with links to absentee ballot information for their particular state. This can be done right away and repeated when the deadlines for securing absentee ballots approaches.

Wide distribution of the information of the absentee ballot opportunity will also help white Americans who visit the Obama campaign site. In 2004 there were 70 million whites who were registered to vote but did not cast a ballot. A very large number of these registered voters could have used the easy absentee ballot alternative.