They say that the 1948 US presidential election was the first television campaign in history: that, for the first time, how candidates came across on television was a crucial factor in making up voters’ minds. Election 2000, analysts predicted, would likewise prove to be the first internet election. We would move into a new technological age, where both candidates and voters would use the internet as the critical new political tool. Just four years ago, after all, only 4 per cent of the American public and 22 per cent of computer users went online for their presidential election news: this year, a veritable explosion of internet use was anticipated, with candidates winning votes and speculators amassing fortunes in the scramble to win the world’s first internet electoral war.
Yet, like the election itself, nothing turned out quite as expected. Yes, the internet was used vastly more than even four years ago, with 43 per cent of US voters saying it helped them make their voting decisions. Four times as many Americans looked to the net to get their election news; on election day alone, abcNEWS.com (the internet wing of the ABC television network’s news) scored 27.1 million hits, its previous high having been the ten million who looked in to view the Kenneth Starr report on Clinton’n’Monica. “The numbers were rather astronomical,” says Allen Weiner, a web-traffic analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings. In the election period – and, even more so, in its astonishing aftermath – mainstream news websites reported increased traffic of between 130 and 500 per cent.
This time, the candidates all made sure that they, too, had efficient, user-friendly websites which likewise experienced big traffic: the day after Senator John McCain beat Boy George in the New Hampshire Republican primaries, he received $1m in pledges via the internet, made in average single donations of $110. Dubbya’s organisation was efficient enough to have a section in Spanish for Hispanic voters and, when the wrangles in Florida deepened, the first words users read on his official website were “You can contribute”. Similarly, the very first post-election words on Al Gore’s site were “Make a secure online contribution to the Gore- Lieberman Recount Committee”. The Palm Beach Post, in the eye of the post-electoral storm in Florida, reported that now – because of the internet – “all local politics are global as well”.
Those hoping to make their fortunes from specially set-up dotcom companies, however, were mostly disappointed. The most famous – www.voters.com, known mostly because it was started by one of Bill Clinton’s most controversial ex-political advisers, Dick Morris – experienced nothing like the success it had expected. It kept going but, as early as August, it was laying off staff. “It’s hard to see how many [similar organisations] will survive,” says David Brady, a professor of political science at Stanford University. He is on the board of one of them, www.election.com, he says, only because it performs a useful service for voters.
“The real money to be made at election.com is in local elections and in union elections,” he says. That is because the primary commercial function of such dotcom companies is to carry out polls, and then to market the resulting information to clients. But one such service set up with high hopes, www.pseudo.com, has already gone out of business.
Where the internet did come into its own in Election 2000, though, was in the amateur humour that proliferated wildly, especially in the 36 undecided days after the election. But here again, forecasters were mostly wrong. Although some success was enjoyed by commercial companies set up specially to market electoral humour, what really took off were jokey e-mails sent from one individual to another; the power of the internet was shown when a single e-mail sent in the early morning could then be bounced back to the sender by the end of the day, having travelled around the world via cyberspace. (I know this from personal experience: several times, friends in Washington e-mailed me electoral jokes that I would then receive recycled from Britain within hours.) A spoof proclamation from the Queen, retaking America as a colony because of its inability to run an election, likewise ricocheted around the world.
No better example of this was provided than by Michael Collins, a 26-year-old engineer who drew a cartoon lampooning the notorious “butterfly” ballot in Florida’s Palm Beach County, which probably robbed Al Gore of the presidency. The morning after the election, Collins e-mailed his cartoon – showing a straight line pointing to the hole for Boy George, while a hopelessly jumbled maze of lines finally pointed to the names of Buchanan, Gore and Nader – to 30 of his friends. A day later, 17,000 people had visited his website to see it, and soon the figure was in the millions. “The internet is more powerful than God these days,” he says. “God didn’t get my cartoon published in a German newspaper.”
Above all, however, Election 2000 highlighted the disastrously hokey and different systems of voting currently used in the US. And this, ultimately, is where the internet is likely to prove most crucial: through its use for actual voting. Four years ago, in Arizona, 40,000 people voted under the auspices of www.election.com – but many complaints followed, with voters saying they had mislaid the Pin numbers they needed and users of Apple Mac computers, in particular, experiencing technical problems. A year ago, however, President Clinton launched an initiative to explore ways in which voters could vote electronically, thus eliminating confusion over punchcards and other leftovers from 1960s technology. When people vote from home in large numbers, the internet revolution, electorally speaking, truly will have arrived.
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