http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/000236.php
>...
Problem #3: This almost never works. The idea you can make up serious
losses among existing voters by turning out lots of nonvoters is a
very dangerous game indeed. Nonvoters rarely differ enough from
voters of similar characteristics to warrant such an approach. (For
those who want the long course on why this is so, DR recommends, in
all due modesty, The Disappearing American Voter) Instead, stick to
the tried and true: get out your base (the folks you know will vote
for you); fight like hell for the swing voters; and hope that an
exciting campaign will bring in some new voters that will lean your
way. But to vest your hopes in new voters is a serious—albeit
common—mistake.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0815783035/qid=1058907867/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/102-4528937-5565754?v=glance&s=books The Disappearing American Voter (Paperback) by Ruy A. Teixeira
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:63v0YJTFd6wJ:www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/05/30/who_votes_and_who_cares%3Fmode%3DPF+non-voters+teixeira
>...At the same time, Motor Voter's legacy might give pause.
Apparently, motor voters don't necessarily trend Democratic so much as
apathetic. Since the law's passage, registration is up, but voting
isn't -- and the Census Bureau found that, strangely enough, fewer
people said they were registered in 1996, three years after Motor
Voter went into effect, than in 1992, the year before. As Wattenberg
writes in his book "Where Have All the Voters Gone?" (2002), "The
Motor Voter procedures apparently made registering so easy that many
forgot that their names were on the voting ledgers."
More strikingly, a significant body of research suggests that, even if nonvoters somehow found themselves in a voting booth, they would act a lot like today's voters. As Ruy Teixeira, author of "Why Americans Don't Vote" (1987) and "The Disappearing American Voter" (1992), puts it, "It generally seems to be true that the level of voting doesn't make a huge difference in the outcome." Teixeira and others argue that the National Election Studies (NES), a series of polls conducted in every presidential campaign since 1952, as well as other survey data, simply don't show a significant difference between the political preferences of voters and nonvoters.
According to UC-Berkeley political scientist Raymond Wolfinger, who has also studied the NES results, we only assume otherwise because we don't pay attention to the relative size of the different groups in the so-called "party of nonvoters." It's not, in fact, the poor or minorities who make up its bulk. The most decisive factors in whether or not one votes, Wolfinger says, are age, education level, and how long one has lived in the same place."
Once you take those three things into account -- and they don't add up to a politically distinctive group -- other things don't make much difference," he says. If nonvoters did have an impact, Wolfinger adds, it would be to occasionally favor third-party candidates like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. (In 1968, he points out, the segregationist candidate George Wallace was preferred by twice as many nonvoters as voters.)