I agree that getting as many people as possible involved in the political process is an unambiguous good, and I also agree that voting is like most habits: the younger you begin, the more likely you are to stick with it. I am also glad to see Republicans are no longer ambivalent - at least officially - about get-out-the-vote efforts.

This election season is seeing an unprecedented number of voter campaigns:

Today, Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan voter-registration group started by the television producer Norman Lear, will raise two giant billboards in Times Square, showing Christina Aguilera and André 3000 with their mouths held shut, next to the message, "Only you can silence yourself."

"We're approaching a cause as a brand," said Howard Benenson, chief executive at Benenson Janson in Studio City, Calif., the Declare Yourself agency. "It's not any different than any corporate American company," he said. "It's all about creating a brand of passion for consumers."

The great unregistered are receiving pitches from groups with wildly divergent world views, including Cast the Vote, the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, Redeem the Vote, Voter Virgin, VoteLoud, Voces del Pueblo and Punk Voter. Rock the Vote and Choose or Lose, continuing campaigns that were established in the 1990's, are veterans by now.

But all the vote marketers are searching out their targets with a sprawling set of marketing strategies, like sending interactive text messages to cellphones, selling tie-in merchandise like $20 designer t-shirts, creating Web logs and producing performances by everyone from the Rza of Wu-Tang Clan fame to the Rock 'N' Roll Worship Circus.

Political analysts said the newly pervasive voter-registration drives reflected lessons from the 2000 election, which showed that a few votes can decide large events, as well as a widespread sense that the coming election holds especially high stakes. But the efforts stem, too, from indications that young people, the targets of many of these campaigns, are increasingly engaged in politics.

In the Iowa caucus this year, for example, 17 percent of the participants were under 30 years old, up from just 9 percent in 2000, according to the Harvard University Institute of Politics.

....But the attention-getting campaigns from nonpartisans lead to questions about who benefits from registering young voters. Ian Rowe, vice president for public affairs at MTV, said that the most common assumptions, that the young tend not to vote but lean Democratic when they do vote, are not evident in the polling MTV has conducted in conjunction with its Choose or Lose program.

"This year, the audience is split and undecided," Mr. Rowe said.

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