By Noah Davis,Special to the Sun Journal

LEWISTON – The 2004 election cycle is over but for Alexis McGill, the executive director for Citizen Change, the fight for voter registration has just begun.

In the Chase Hall Lounge at Bates College, McGill spoke last week to an audience of students, professors and local townspeople about the efforts of Citizen Change to get out the vote among minorities and young people during the 2004 election.

“We are fighting a war when it comes to voter apathy in our community,” McGill said.

Citizen Change, started by rap mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs, is a nonpartisan group working solely to increase voter turnout. The goal was to educate and to “break down the basics of voting, combat urban myths and fears, and address them.”

It was the organization responsible for the “Vote or Die” campaign. The slogan was “intended to be provocative, urgent and, most importantly, sexy” in hopes of making “voting seem cool,” McGill said.

Ultimately, the campaign was successful as both African-Americans and young people turned out to vote in record numbers. Almost 22 million people between the ages of 18 and 35 voted, up from around 15 million in 2000, while 3 million African-Americans voted for the first time in the 2004 elections.

McGill furthered this assertion by explaining that politicians paid attention to young people for the first time, a trend that has continued, evidenced by the increased concern from politicians about young people’s perceptions of Social Security.

One reason for the success of the campaign was that Citizen Change “took the campaign where traditional politicians don’t go,” McGill said. They went “barbershop by barbershop, nail salon to nail salon” to reach people who were not planning to vote.

McGill told a heartfelt story about receiving a call at 6:15 a.m. election morning from a person in Cleveland who was standing outside a voting place, watching 300 young African-Americans standing patiently in line waiting to vote. For her, this call was the highlight of months of struggle.

However, the work of Citizen Change is far from done. One fault of the program, according to McGill, was that the group lacked a coherent strategy for what to do after Nov. 2.

“In hindsight, I wish we had more of a plan for Nov. 3,” McGill said. The challenge now becomes keeping the momentum of programs such as Citizen Change going until the next election and getting people involved in local and state elections, as well as national ones.

McGill graduated from Princeton University with a major in the Department of Politics with a focus on Latin American social movements. Before working with Citizen Change, she worked as the political director for the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, an organization started by hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons to increase voter awareness and turnout.

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