According to a recent, sensational survey from Samsung Mobile, 61 percent of lazy, distracted, and impossibly ignorant cellphone users over the age 18 say they would be comfortable casting their vote for President of the United States via a text message. Meanwhile, the totally serious and meaningful survey found that eight in ten (or 80 percent) of teens under the legal voting age would use their mobile devices to cast a ballot in the election. Additionally, Samsung Mobile discovered that 90 percent of cellphone users would like an ice cream cone, while another 87 percent would like an ice cream cone only after eating a quarter-pounder with cheese. Soon Samsung Mobile hopes to determine what percentage, if any, of the people surveyed know who is running for the office of president.

Despite skyrocketing growth, it's no secret that acceptance of text messaging in the US is still light years behind Europe and Asia. Countries around the world have been using SMS as a viable, effective method to get out the vote ahead of elections for years, and although we've seen sporadic efforts to do the same stateside, there has been no concentrated effort that has yielded tangible, measurable results. Of course, that's likely to change over the course of the next two or three presidential elections; young'uns in the US are far more likely than any other age group to send and receive text messages, after all, and those crafty politicians are always looking for exciting new ways to trumpet their agendas. Indeed, AFP points out that three Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidency -- Obama, Clinton, and Edwards -- have SMS short codes set up that let folks subscribe to campaign updates (interestingly, no Republican candidates have followed suit so far). A study by a Princeton grad student looking into technology in elections showed that people who were texted shortly before an election were a full four percent more likely to vote; while that doesn't sound like a big number, it's huge when you're talking about a national election where a single percent accounts for a million or more voters. Heck, who knows, in 20 years, we could all be voting by SMS, American Idol-style.