Dallas ? Youth advocates on Wednesday criticized a House vote on the military draft as a political ploy to stifle debate on a topic important to young voters.

“Congress has to stop playing games and level with young people about how we are really going to meet troop commitments in the war on terror, especially if the war in Iraq bogs down or the fighting expands to other countries,” said Jehmu Greene, president of Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan group that seeks to boost voter turnout among young people.

“You have an entire generation up in arms and concerned that this is a war they’re going to be forced to fight and both sides doing political gamesmanship,” she said.

Republican leaders, accusing the Democrats of raising the specter of compulsory military service to drive voters away from President Bush, pushed for a quick vote on the bill Tuesday.

The measure, which would have required two years of national service, was rejected 402-2. Even its sponsor, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., voted against the bill, saying that he had introduced the legislation to prompt hearings on military manpower needs and how to best share the burden of military service. The quick vote prevented that debate, Rangel said.

But Greene vowed that the issue would not go away.

“It’s not settled in the least,” she said. “We’re going to mobilize all young people to call on Congress and both presidential candidates to give this serious attention because we need an informed debate. It’s not a partisan issue.”

The emergence of the military draft as a hot political issue is also a clear sign of how young voters using the Internet are influencing politics, said Carol Darr, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.

“The draft is an issue that uniquely affects young people and especially young men, and they are a demographic overrepresented on the Internet and especially blogs,” Darr said.

Questions about a wartime draft have swirled across the Internet in recent weeks, fueled in part by statements from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. On Sept. 22, citing the war in Iraq and other potential hot spots, Kerry raised the possibility that a military draft could be reinstated if voters re-elected Bush.

“That story quickly got linked and posted to blogs, and particularly on influential blogs, both liberal and conservative,” Darr said, citing dailykos.com and drudgereport.com, which both have hundreds of thousands of viewers daily.

At the same time, Rock the Vote has featured on its Web site an issue paper about the possibilities of a military draft as well as the results of a recent poll of 18-to-29-year-olds conducted by CBS for MTV, which found that 78 percent opposed reinstating the draft while just 18 percent favored it.

Republicans have accused the Democrats of pushing the issue for political purposes.