Michelle Obama and the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced an outreach program by the Barack Obama presidential campaign to register black voters and get them to the polls in November and more engaged, generally, in civic life.

In a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Obama said the effort would include voter education to help people navigate the registration process, procure absentee ballots when necessary, locating and getting to their polling places.

“We will be casting our ballots to get us to the world as it should be,” she said, noting that she developed an appreciation for the importance of voting while tagging along with her father, a precinct captain on the South Side of Chicago, as he helped neighbors register to vote and arranged to get them to the polls on Election Day.

She said it was important to get people to vote for a new direction and that African Americans who don’t vote will be “casting a ballot for the world as it is. We can’t accept that, even though I understand those worries” that their votes don’t count or may not change the conditions of their lives as they struggle with employment and health care issues.

Obama said 1.3 million African Americans who were registered to vote in 2004 did not do so.

Further, she said, “One in five African Americans doesn’t have health care, a quarter of our community lives in poverty. Almost 26 million African Americans are eligible to vote but 8 million, or 32 percent, aren’t registered, so we’re in danger of repeating the same behavior as four years ago.”

The campaign is employing microtargeting, a technique that focuses on unregistered voters, a group the campaign believes is ripe to back Obama if pressed to get on board.

President Bush also used microtargeting techniques to find potential supporters among likely voters in 2004. Obama's focus is more on finding people who are not registered to vote and figuring out how to persuade them to sign up and back him. During the primary season, the Obama campaign maintains, they registered more than a half million voters.

In addition to 8.1 unregistered black voters, the Obama campaign has identified another 8 million unregistered Hispanics and nearly 7.5 million unregistered people between the ages of 18 and 24. Officials also are looking at more women versus men, more highly educated voters, people on fixed incomes and those who have moved across state lines in recent years and could change the voter makeup.

Steve Hildebrand, the Obama adviser overseeing the effort, said the campaign has identified 55 million unregistered voters across the country, by comparing registration lists with lists of potential voters gleaned by mining consumer databases the same way credit card companies track people's spending. The campaign estimates more than two-thirds would vote for Obama if they were registered and motivated.

Lowery, a veteran civil rights leader and a lieutenant of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., described the effort as a “holy mission.”

“Voting is a sacred rite for all Americans,” Lowery said, “but for us in the African-American experience, it is a sacred rite and a moral obligation.

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Associated Press contributed to this article.