South Asian American students across the country are coordinating a massive 'get out the vote" campaign to turn out South Asian voters to the polls on November 2. In effort to increase political participation in their community, South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY) hired eight SAAVY Fellows in NY, MI, GA and NY. These college students were recruited to register, educate and mobilize Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis on their campuses and in their communities.

There are over 2 million South Asians in the United States who are eligible to vote and according to the 2000 Census, only a third of them are registered. SAAVY was founded in 2002 to train young South Asian Americans help their communities engage in the political process. A non-partisan project of SAALT (South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow), SAAVY believes that South Asian Americans must vote and engage in the political system if they want to have a voice and obtain political power.

The 'VOTE SAAVY" campaign has registered 2,500 South Asian American voters in ten weeks and will mobilize twice as many individuals to the polls. Representative campuses include University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Florida, Gainesville; New York University, New York; University of Georgia, Athens; and Emory University, Atlanta.

With less than a week before the election, SAAVY Fellows are utilizing a variety of strategies to educate South Asian Americans on important issues. Some of the most successful tactics include organizing issue forums, facilitating roundtable discussions, coordinating phone banks and surveying South Asians to learn what issues are most important to them.

In Georgia, SAAVY Fellows and their volunteers plan to call 300 South Asians and remind them to vote. At the University of Georgia at Athens, students are renting vehicles to drive voters to the polls.

The SAAVY Fellows in Florida merged art and activism to encourage political participation. SAAVY organized a concert entitled, 'Speak Up! Act Up!" in conjunction with the international human rights organization Breakthrough. Artists and speakers motivated a crowd of hundreds of students to raise their voices on Election Day.

In coordination with the Asian American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (AALDEF), SAAVY Fellows in Ann Arbor and New York will train and mobilize over 400 volunteers on Election Day. These volunteers will serve as poll monitors and language interpreters to ensure that South Asians are able to vote fairly on Election Day. In addition, volunteers will conduct exit polls to document any problems voters may experience.

At the University of Michigan, fellows are coordinating with campus organizations and the Youth Vote Coalition to throw a South Asian roundtable to discuss South Asians in politics, as well as an Election Day party to watch the Election Day results come in.

SAAVY National Coordinator, Tanzila 'Taz" Ahmed, is proud of the Vote SAAVY Campaign's success. 'The fact that we registered thousands of new South Asian voters is certainly a victory," Taz Ahmed says. 'However, the fact that youth leaders were able to increase voter registration and participation within their communities are the real milestones of the Vote SAAVY Campaign."