[courtesy of California Progress Report]

The James Irvine Foundation has released a 44 page report, "New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: A Report on the California Votes Initiative",that is the product of a multi-year study of infrequent voters.

The authors of this report, Melissa R. Michelson of California State University East Bay,Lisa García Bedolla of the University of California at Irvine, and Donald P. Green of Yale University are all respected scholars. Green is the author of Get Out The Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout, published in 2004 by the Brookings Institution Press.

While the information here is of tremendous interest to those involved in the hurly burly of political campaigns, there is a very important point they make as well: The electorate that is turning out does not represent California's diversity. At the beginning of the report, they say: