By Rochelle Riley

Read the original article at The Detroit Free Press.

DENVER - The TV ad features famous actresses on looking straight into a camera and talking about the first time they "did it."

"I did a little research on the positions that I liked..." said TV actress Angie Harmon.

"All that energy flowing inside and you go inside and commit. It's a beautiful thing," said King again.

"I like to do it in the morning when I'm fresh," said Felicity Huffman, star of ABC-TV's "Desperate Housewives."

"The first man had a crush on wasn't my dad. It was John F. Kennedy. And I wanted to do it for him," said veteran actress Tyne Daly.

The women were all talking about the first time they voted, and their target audience is unmarried American women — single, separated, divorced or widowed.

The ad was unveiled as part of a national effort by Women's Voices Women Vote to register and empower single women, who make up a quarter of voting age Americans, but who vote less often than married women.

"We have a chance to change the composition of the electorate with women leading the way... ," said Page Gardner, founder and president of Women's Voices. She said the group wants to do that by focusing more attention on the marriage gap. A poll on the gap, which her group released today, shows that:

Sen. Barack Obama leads Sen. John McCain by 34 points with single women under who 40, but only 2 points with younger married women.

Obama leads, as well, with single women 40 and older by 26 points over McCain, who leads with married women by 5 points.

Gardner said the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research poll shows that marital status can predict a vote more than gender, age or race.

“Whether or not you’re married has extraordinary power in determining how you vote,” she said. “If you’re on your own, you’re more likely to be economically vulnerable, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet – and you’re much more likely to vote for the more progressive candidate.”

Gardner spoke at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts on a stage that featured white furniture on a white shag carpet.

She described this new voting bloc as one that could turn elections. And she's right.

"Thirty million unmarried women did not vote in the 2004 election," she said. "Think of the difference."

"If we want to change America's leadership and direction, then the answer here today is to empower these women, women on their own, to register, to vote and to make their voices heard," she said.

"Unfortunately, compared to married women, they’re 9 percentage points less likely to register.

Gardner said her group has registered 650,000 new single women voters and hopes to reach 1 million potential voters with "reliable, nonpartisan information on the mechanics of voting." The group also helps them register.

"We're bringing democracy to them in their homes, where they live," Gardner said. "We want these women to make political participation a part of their lives, and a part of their lives that’s easy and natural.

"None of us can afford to have these women or any women sit on the sidelines of our democracy," she said. "We must make a special effort to mobilize and energize women on their own."