WASHINGTON, 22 January 2008 — The Democratic debate in Nevada last week was all sweetness and light. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards sat around the same table and smiled at each other. Praise for their rivals, not fresh attacks, was the name of the game.
Which, of course, was exactly the impression all the candidates wanted to send out to the viewing public. Each campaign wanted to appear presidential and above the fray, not throwing low punches at rivals. However, beneath the calm a fierce and brutal proxy war is being waged across both the Republican and Democratic contests. It involves an intricate web of surrogate groups, websites, blogs and e-mails and its emergence into the day-to-day operations of an American election is a revolutionary phenomenon.
This underground battle is fought mostly on the Internet and involves attacking opponents every bit as much as pushing candidates. Unlike televised debates, on the Internet no one needs to play nice. “We are seeing candidates use these proxies as a political weapon,” says Jack Lule, a journalism professor at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University.
Typical of this new tool is Hillaryis44.org. The website, which gets its name from hoping Hillary will be America’s 44th president, has no provable link with the Hillary campaign. In fact, its creator is a mystery. But it is lavishly produced, slavishly for Hillary and virulent in its attacks on Obama. It has lengthy posts alleging his involvement in shady property deals in Chicago and urges visitors to publicize negative things about his campaign.
But Hillaryis44 is hardly alone in the exploding new universe of negative campaigning on the Internet. Similar websites have been set up against Republican candidates such as Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. Some are vicious, some more subtle. They allege false positions or character assassinations. Some blog posts have even carried details of one man Democratic candidate’s alleged extra-marital affair (for which there is no proof). They go far beyond what the mainstream media will report on and, just as importantly, what rival candidates themselves will say in public. Candidates can deny any link to the sites even as they do their job for them.
It is this “plausible deniability” that is key to their attraction because, while negative campaigning works, it is also widely despised by the electorate. “It’s all about getting someone else to do your dirty work. It has to be a subtle game. You plan this stuff but don’t want it traced back to you,” says Lule.
The phenomenon is just one other way the Internet is changing how American elections are fought. Having already revolutionized the way campaigns make money, it is set to change how candidates get their messages out and take down rivals. Experts have compared it to the way that the emergence of TV and radio changed politics in the twenties, when politicians realized these new media could be used for political purposes.
“Society is reacting in the same way as it did to film, radio and TV. The science of communication simply cannot yet keep up with or predict the scale of the changes this will bring,” says Bruce Gronbeck, a communications professor at the University of Iowa.
But neither can the campaigns themselves. Just as the Internet is liberating candidates to put out messages they could not in traditional media, the freedom of the Internet means they might also lose control of those messages.
The main example of this has been the whispering online campaign which alleges that Obama is a secret Muslim. Many ordinary voters have received e-mails making the demonstrably false claim and it is unclear whether the origins of the messages were from Democrats, Republicans or just one individual. But they forced Obama to publicly restate his Christian faith.
Whatever the source, e-mails have a life of their own, beyond anyone’s control. Just receiving them has resulted in the resignation of several officials from Clinton’s campaign when it became clear they had forwarded them on. “That’s the problem. They are viral. We don’t know if they began that way or were planned,” says Gronbeck.
At the moment much of the war on the Internet is aimed at generating, or influencing, the election coverage of the mainstream media. It wants to force issues into newspapers and television coverage. But as the phenomenon develops and more campaigning takes place on the Internet, it is possible that the old mainstream media will actually be sidelined by what happens online. That is when the proxy underground war might become the real thing. Even so far, that is not a pretty picture. But experts think that when the nomination process is over and the real Republican versus Democrat contest begins, it will be even nastier. “The presidential race will be dirtier than the run-up. There will be even more of this stuff then,” says Lule.
Meanwhile, this year, for the first time, expatriate Democrats can cast their ballots on the Internet in a presidential primary for people living outside the United States.
Democrats Abroad, an official branch of the party representing overseas voters, will hold its first global presidential preference primary from Feb. 5 to 12, with expats selecting the candidate of their choice by Internet as well as fax, mail and in-person at polling places in more than 100 countries.
Democrats Abroad is particularly proud of the online voting option — which provides a new alternative to the usual process of voting from overseas, a system made difficult by complicated voter registration paperwork, early deadlines and unreliable foreign mail service.
“The online system is incredibly secure: That was one of our biggest goals,” said Lindsey Reynolds, executive director of Democrats Abroad. “And it does allow access to folks who ordinarily wouldn’t get to participate.”
US citizens wanting to vote online must join Democrats Abroad before Feb. 1 and indicate their preference to vote by Internet instead of in the local primaries wherever they last lived in the United States. They must promise not to vote twice for president, but can still participate in non-presidential local elections.
Members get a personal identification number from Everyone Counts Inc., the San Diego-based company running the online election. They can then use the number to log in and cast their ballots.
Their votes will be represented at the August Democratic National Convention by 22 delegates, who according to party rules get half a vote each for a total of 11. That’s more than US territories get, but fewer than the least populous states, Wyoming and Alaska, which get 18 delegate votes each.
Everyone Counts has been building elections software for a decade, running the British Labour Party’s online voting since 2000 and other British elections since 2003, chief executive officer Lori Steele said.
Online voting may give absentee voters more assurance that their ballots are being counted, since confirmation is not available in some counties. The Everyone Counts software even lets voters print out a receipt, unlike most electronic voting machines now in use in many states.
“We’ve had no security breaches. We do constant monitoring,” Steele said. Online voting “provides really a higher standard of security than is available in any other kind of system, including paper.”
Steele said a number of US states had contacted her company to inquire about online voting for the 2008 presidential election.
“There are many, many states in the US that would like to be offering this to their expatriate voters, their military voters and their disabled voters,” Steele said.
But online voting has been slowed by a lack of funding for pilot programs. In a floor speech this month, Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., pushed for the distribution of money already approved under the Help America Vote Act so that states can improve ex-pat voting before the general election.
Some 6 million Americans living abroad are eligible to vote in US elections, but only a fraction do so. Until recently, the only option was to mail absentee ballot request forms to the last US county of residence, then wait in hopes that shaky mail systems would deliver the ballots in time to vote.
The system is so unreliable that of 992,034 ballots requested from overseas for the 2006 general election, only 330,000 were cast or counted, and 70 percent of those not counted were returned to elections officials as undeliverable, the US Election Assistance Commission found.
In 2004, Juliet Lambert took her Oregon ballot to the US Embassy in Mexico City, where drop service is available because of Mexico’s notoriously undependable mail.
“I had to go through security to drop off my ballot, and I remember thinking I really must want to vote,” said Lambert, a 37-year-old caterer who works with Democrats Abroad in Mexico. “I think it can be really daunting for people.”
This year, Lambert is voting by Internet, “because it’s easier, and I’m always online anyway.”
Republicans Abroad has operated independently of the Republican Party since 2003, and therefore can’t hold in-person or Internet votes abroad. But it is organizing to get more overseas Republicans registered back home before the primaries, Executive Director Cynthia Dillon said.
Republican votes from overseas could be more decisive because even small margins can make a difference in their winner-take-all state primaries. The Democrats divide primary votes proportionally, assigning delegates according to each leading candidate’s share.
“In the Republican primary, the overseas vote could actually have a bigger impact: That vote could be the tipping vote, so to speak, that decides an election in a close race,” said Steven Hill, an elections expert who directs the New America Foundation’s Political Reform Program.
With so many states having moved up their primary dates, overseas voters should hurry up and register no matter how they plan on voting, Hill said. “These compressed timetables really make it difficult.”
