Let’s say you were going to place a personals ad from the largest untapped potential voting bloc in the country and address it to all candidates running for office this year. Based on the results of a recent poll commissioned by Women’s Voices Women Vote, a non-partisan voter-participation project, the ad might read something like this:

“SWF (single weary female) looking for someone who gives more than a rat’s posterior about the major concerns in my life. Seeking a candidate who wants me and my kids to have affordable health care. Would like someone who cares about education and wants to give me a chance to do more than clean hotel rooms or work in the grocery store checkout aisle for the rest of my life. Want a candidate who doesn’t confuse me with a lot of double talk. Those who conduct business as usual need not apply.”

During the 2004 presidential campaign we began hearing a lot about the bloc of 22 million single women who are eligible to vote – but don’t. We found out that they have the power to change the course of an election if only they would get involved. Hundreds of thousands more of them voted in ’04 than ever before, but the majority still stayed away from the polls.

For this year’s midterm elections, the people at Women’s Voices Women Vote are continuing to analyze this group that makes up the so-called “marriage gap.” Chris Desser, co-director of WVWV who is based in San Francisco, said she can’t figure out why politicians haven’t done more to close the gap. “The powers that be have deeply failed to understand how reachable this cohort is,” she said.

Polling results show that when these women do vote, they overwhelmingly favor Democrats. That’s not surprising, considering that most of them make less than $30,000 a year and many are supporting children on their own. But what is surprising is the reason so many of them don’t vote: They say they don’t feel informed enough to cast a ballot. Or, as WVWV co-director Page Gardner put it, “They can be motivated to participate if they feel they have enough information, but they want to make sure they are ‘smart voters.”‘

Hey, all they have to do is listen to the callers on radio talk shows to realize that we already have plenty of uninformed yahoos who are only too happy to vote. Why do these single female non-voters look at the ballot as a final exam?

Maybe the real trick to get them to participate is finding them where they live. One volunteer grass-roots effort in the San Francisco Bay Area called 1,000 Flowers sprang from the ’04 campaign and was able to reach thousands of single women by launching a voter-registration drive aimed at clients in nail salons. Martha Belcher, a founder of 1,000 Flowers who lives in Berkeley, estimated that more than half of the 30,000 registration cards sent to salons in seven states were filled out and sent in.

Now the group is designing a new set of voter-registration kits that are slated to appear in demographically targeted nail salons sometime this summer.

“Our theme will be ‘Voting Is Beautiful,”‘ Belcher said. “The idea is: Make our democracy blossom.”

That sounds like a pretty appealing personals ad to all those fed-up single women standing on the sidelines. The question is, how many of them will finally feel that they’ve connected with the candidate who is the right match?

It’s a match that has the potential to change the country.

– Sue Hutchison is a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Her e-mail address is shutchison@mercurynews.com.