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When the Presidential election ended in a standoff on Nov. 8, all Democrat Andrew Cooper and his five liberal-leaning co-workers at long-distance company Working Assets could talk about was the controversy surrounding the recount in Florida. They trashed the Republicans' attempt to stop the recount and groused that the Electoral College would choose the next President, rather than the popular vote.
At most other companies, such reactions never went much farther than the water cooler. But Cooper and his cohorts turned their disenchantment into a cyber-campaign. They created a Web page, urging surfers to e-mail messages supporting the ballot recount in Palm Beach County, Fla., to state and federal officials. The e-mails particularly targeted the the U.S. Justice Dept. and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
Simple in form, the Working Assets' grassroots effort "exploded beyond our expectations," Cooper says. Within 48 hours of the site going up, more than 100,000 activists from across the country filled out the simple form at www.workingforchange.com, and sent it on, not just to Justice and Jeb, but to the Bush-Cheney campaign as well.
"DUE PROCESS." And that was just the start. In the past few days, thousands more Dems, fired up by the Bush campaign's request for an injunction to stop the recount efforts, filled out similar forms at a handful of other activist sites. "We are not looking for the outcome," Cooper claims. "We are only interested in due process." But these efforts showed how the political process can now be rapidly influenced with a little knowledge of some basic HTML coding and the push of a button.
It doesn't hurt that Cooper is part of Working Assets' political department. Indeed, Working Assets is a socially conscious company with a long history of supporting liberal movements and progressive nonprofits. But Working Assets isn't alone in the battle for the Presidency still raging on the Net. "We hope Al Gore is sworn in in January. Our goal is to help Democrats use the Internet to win elections," says Bob Fertik, of www.trustthepeople.com. Fertik's day job? He is the managing partner of Democrats.com, which designs Web sites for Democratic candidates and elected officials.
Fertik and Cooper might have an uphill battle. According to a recent Jupiter Media Metrix study, registered Republicans, at 36.8% of the online adult population older than 18, outnumber the 27.9% online population of Democrats. And the most notable online fund-raising success of the past campaign season was the lightning insurgency of Republican Senator John McCain.
"BURY PALM BEACH." Indeed, the Republicans are Net-savvy, too. GOP voters have expressed plenty of opinion in the online chatrooms since Election Day. Someone nicknamed "Vox" and claiming to be a Florida nurse wrote on Grassroots.com on Nov. 14: "If you want to revote Democratic West Palm Beach...we will also demand a revote of a deeply Republican Duval County where it has just been learned that a whopping 27,000 ballots were disqualified and uncounted.... Let's revote this massive Duval County and bury the Palm Beach crowd. You see, you open a can of worms, sometimes you have to eat 'em."
Many see the uncertainty surrounding the election's outcome as a perfect time to test out this new medium. "I see this crisis as a coming of age for political activism," Cooper says. "I believe the technology is good enough now so we can put an action on the Web. There's a great movement on the Net right now."
Such nascent sites could wield a big political stick in the future. Already, Fertik's has collected 3,012 affidavits to aid in any lawsuit the Democratic Party might file contesting the Florida count. Then there's www.demandarevote.com, where Democrat Mike Panette encourages voters to send Florida officials petitions stating, "Thousands of voters were robbed of their voice in the election by the unusual ballots used in Palm Beach County." Panette, a 29-year-old Web developer living in Washington, D.C., says more than 1,200 people have sent petitions from his site as of Nov. 13. "On the Internet, an idea can go from just an idea to something else and spread like a virus," he says.
Experts concur. "The Web has become an excellent [way] not only to collect but also disseminate information," says Betty Cho, Internet analyst at Nielsen/Net Ratings. "With a click of a button, you can send information to hundreds of people." For now, the grass is greener at the grassroots, where the passion and conviction that both Gore and Bush sought during the campaign seems to thrive. There's a lesson here that both parties would be wise to learn.
By Olga Kharif in New York Edited by Alex Salkever
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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