The corps includes the much-publicized phone banks, which bring together as many as two dozen people in private homes and union headquarters, but tens of thousands of members also work alone in the comfort of their homes -- sometimes in their pajamas -- to organize Democrats more than 3,000 miles away. Armed with electronic instructions from John Kerry's website, callers from California to Texas to Georgia to Connecticut aid pressed-for-time swing state staff by scheduling local volunteers for shifts and directing them to canvassing locations.

"It's really been a great way to feel like I'm helping," said phone corps volunteer Carla Thornton, 46, of Alameda. "Since I'm living in a state that's Kerry's already."

John Kerry supporters attended an Election Day phonebanking party at a Berkeley home to urge voters in Akron, Ohio to support the Democratic candidate. Photo by Jeff Kearns

The phone corps made its world debut this election year. Borrowing from the philosophy of the Howard Dean campaign, which gained unprecedented momentum and financial support from the web-based enthusiasm of thousands around the United States, the phone corps depends on the dedication of a hodgepodge of Internet-savvy Democrats to activate their counterparts from afar.

Though the crux of the phone corps is person-to-person interaction, signing up to volunteer through the Kerry site requires no human contact. After identifying herself, a prospective volunteer is provided a detailed script that tells her what to say when she phones a specific swing state, whether she gets a live person, an answering machine, or a negative response. The site also provides the names and numbers of five people at a time for the volunteer to call. One day the focus of calls might be Florida, the next Ohio and Colorado. By early October, the phone corps had more than 60,000 members; out of a total of 600,000 calls, corps volunteers reached 310,000 people.

Carla Thornton has been working her touchtone for more than a month now. She has spoken with a range of Democrats, from middle-aged adults to college students in their dorm rooms. "I talked to some great people all over the country who wanted to talk about the situation," said Thornton. "They're so glad that I called to ask them for help."

Thornton convinced her friend Jeff Morris, 61, a bookmaker who lives in Austin, Texas, to join the phone corps. He made about 20 calls each night for several weeks from his Bush-backing state. On Friday he headed for Florida to canvass and monitor the polls.

"A small percentage of the people I called will go out and do something," he said. "A small number of the people they contact will probably vote for Kerry, whereas they otherwise wouldn't."

Not surprisingly, phone corps members say occasionally they are mistaken for telemarketers. Thornton said sometimes she has to explain to people, "I haven't asked you for money, I'm asking you to go somewhere and do something."

Like Thornton, Chris Bilal, 17, of Baltimore, was confused for a telemarketer and had several people hang up on him when he devoted a day to the corps. He recounted his experience on the Young Liberals weblog, a site he founded that bills itself as "The Official Blog of Young Liberals Worldwide."

Despite his initial frustration, Bilal made a breakthrough with one caller who was listed as a Democrat that had expressed interest in volunteering, but who turned out to be undecided. After two phone conversations and a follow-up e-mail, the woman, who told him she had had an abortion, has a gay aunt, and has been directly affected by outsourcing to India, decided to vote for Kerry. "Her feelings really affect me," wrote Bilal, "and make me realize how serious this election is. Unlike others who hung up on me, she had a story and a will for change."

Though wrong numbers and accidental calls to Bush supporters may slow their progress, the phone corps is having a notable impact. In an October e-mail to volunteers, Phone Corps Designer Josh Hendler wrote "In Florida, your recent calls produced a success so great a member of our team went down to observe the results. We had more than 6,000 RSVPs altogether for the Florida canvasses."

Of the more than 100 volunteers who showed up to a recent event in the city of Plantation, Hendler said, at least 80 percent of the participants attributed their presence to a call from an out-of-state volunteer.

Marci Youngmark, volunteer coordinator at Kerry headquarters in New Mexico, said the phone corps has "definitely" helped at her office. "It's has been an asset to our campaign," she said, "and we were very lucky that people were willing to do that."

Though many Republicans may have been willing to join a phone corps, they weren't given the opportunity in 2004. Calls to Republican national and state headquarters revealed the GOP didn't unleashed a force of web-based activists. "The best thing you could do," said a representative at the California headquarters, "would be to call each of the state headquarters and see if they would be willing to give you the numbers."