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The
election and post-election activity is chaotic
By
D. C. Denison
Boston Globe
When
Harvard University junior Harpaul Alberto Kohli first heard
about possible voting irregularities in Palm Beach, the
morning after Election Day, his reaction was almost automatic.
"I started e-mailing a lot of my friends," he recalled.
"Actually not a lot, maybe 35 or so."
Kohli had a few ideas: maybe a protest, maybe the circulation
of a detailed analysis of the Florida election statutes
that a friend of his had done. As his thoughts began to
gel, his e-mail list grew: within 24 hours, he was corresponding
with 130 people; by Friday morning, 48 hours after he sent
his first e-mail, his network had grown to 210.
Soon Kohli, a native of Washington, D.C., found a Web site
that was coordinating protests in cities all over the country.
He also began contributing to a few e-mail discussion lists.
He signed two or three online petitions. By Friday night,
he was helping to coordinate a protest on the steps of the
Massachusetts State House that drew about 100 people. In
one five-hour stretch on Friday night, Kohli received 470
e-mails.
The pace hasn't slackened since. Tuesday, a sleep-deprived
Kohli was still frantically e-mailing sympathetic activists,
planning a follow-up protest for this Saturday. At the same
time he was dealing with "spam" from e-mail activists on
the other side of the issue, and fighting off malicious
attempts by opponents to knock him off pro-"re-vote" e-mail
lists.
"The vote-related activity on the Net is really fast and
furious now," he said. "In fact, it's all-out chaos."
Political chaos is certainly not unique this post-election
season, but Kohli's experience shows that the commotion
now extends to an entirely new front: e-mail and Internet
activism. A number of Web sites now make it very easy for
activists to create e-mail campaigns quickly and Web petitions
for little or no money. And many of these sites are optimized
for quick-starts on late-breaking issues, making them ideal
for instant controversies like the impeachment of a president,
the deportation of Elian Gonzales, or a contested presidential
election.
The wide circulation of "media lists," with personal e-mail
addresses of prominent newspaper editors and television
news directors, has extended the edges of the revolution
directly into the media's e-mail in-boxes.
Michael Cooke, editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times,
has watched the number of e-mails he receives "balloon"
since shortly after Election Day. On Monday, he received
about 1,450 e-mails, most of them urging him to oppose any
"re-votes" in Florida. At least that's what Cooke said,
based on some sampling.
"Basically, I just delete them," he said. "I scroll through
the list looking for my boss's name. If I don't see his
name in the 'from' box, I don't even look at it.
"This is the first time I've been spammed like this, and
it's annoying. Now instead of going out to lunch, I just
sit there deleting e-mails."
The Globe's editor, Matthew V. Storin, reports a similar
deluge. Between Friday afternoon and Monday evening, he
received 2,193 e-mails, the vast majority related to the
voting in Florida. Later, he gave un update: Between 11
p.m. Monday and 10:40 a.m. Tuesday he received 310 e-mails,
he said.
Who is sending these e-mails? People like Jim Noteman, who
works at a technology start-up in Chicago. On Monday, Noteman
received an "Open Letter to Palm Beach County Voters" from
his sister, who had received it earlier from a co-worker.
The letter reflected Noteman's views, so that night he added
his own thoughts and sent it on to a list of media contacts
that had been circulating among a group of Republican activists
in Illinois.
Does it bother Noteman to think that his e-mail was probably
deleted without being read? "Not really," he replied. "I
had some views and I did something about it. I feel good
about that."
Although Noteman's activism does not seem likely to make
much of a difference, some observers are not willing to
count it out entirely.
"The news media and politicians are definitely getting increasingly
savvy about separating the wheat from the chaff," said Paul
Watanabe, a professor in the department of political science
at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "Still, it's
very hard to argue with the multiplier effect: where one
message to a friend can end up getting distributed to thousands
of people at no cost."
The major political parties deny that they coordinate or
sponsor Internet activism to any significant degree. Certainly
none of them encourage e-mail campaigns on their official
Web sites. Yet, even without any formal support, political
intiatives will probably continue to be disseminated over
the Internet, if only because the tools to create Internet
campaigns are widely distributed, easy to use, and free.
Political activists have been quick to take advantage of
free Internet "community" sites. For example, EGroups, an
e-mail list-management site, allows anyone to set up an
e-mail distribution list quickly and for free. Home-page
hosting sites such as GeoCities allow activists to set up
Web-based information pages on the Internet. Petition sites,
such as E The People, SpeakOut, and PetitionOnline allow
activists to set up online petitions that can aggregate
"signers," and forward the results to campaigns and the
media. The result is an always-available, instant information
network for activists like Harpaul Alberto Kohli.
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