[Laborgreens] End of 'Internet elections'? Don't count on it

[laborgreens@gp-us.org]

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End of 'Internet elections'? Don't count on it
By Lauren Gelman

February 2004
<http://practice.findlaw.com/feature-0204.html>

     Does Howard Dean's Third-Place Finish in Iowa Rebut
     the "Internet Election" Concept? Don't Count on It

The results of Iowa Primary were shocking to many:
Howard Dean, widely expected to finish first, or at
least second, came in a weak third. Since Dean was seen
as the Internet candidate, his finish will doubtless
spur a flurry of debate on whether the Internet is
capable, after all, of transforming democracy.

Has the Internet's influence in Election 2004 been
overhyped? Some have suggested that while the Internet
is a valuable tool for organizing and fundraising, it's
no match for the big media or on-the-ground campaigning
necessary to change voters' minds. But let's not
relegate the Internet's impact on American elections to
a footnote just yet.

Blog for America, Meetup.com, and Moveon.org are
significant steps towards capturing the Internet's
potential to transform American politics. Each empowered
the citizen to participate in the political conversation
and campaign in a manner never before experienced. But
they have only begun to suggest the Internet's power to
transform the democratic process.

We have yet to experience the true "Internet Election."
In that election, the Internet will not simply be a tool
for electioneering. Rather, the Internet's design will
itself be a prototype for democratic discourse and
decisionmaking -- as I will explain.

Election 2000: Using the Internet to Convey Information

It's helpful to remember that the first "Internet
Election" actually took place years ago, in 2000 -- the
midst of the dot com boom. Then, the Internet was hailed
for its ability to allow campaigns to reach more people
with more information.

In Washington D.C., where I lived during that campaign
season, buzz about how the Internet was transforming
democracy was everywhere. Campaign web sites, launch
parties for Voter.com and Grassroots.com, and political
banner ads foretold the birth of the "Internet
Election"--or so said the pundits.

Election 2000 was supposed to be "It": proof the
Internet would transform democracy. On this view, before
the Internet, campaigning was a mega-media dominated
enterprise of high-powered consultants, corrupt ballot-
box stuffing precinct bosses and poll-driven candidates.
But after the Internet, campaigning would become a
democratic utopia where every voter has a megaphone,
candidates deliberate carefully, and campaigns respond
to voters' individual voices.

Of course, that vision did not realize itself that year.
And today, Voter.com is bankrupt, blogs have replaced
banner ads, and those campaign websites look quaint to a
broadband-addicted public.

What happened? While evolutionary and innovative, the
Web trends of the late nineties emphasized a model in
which the Internet would be employed simply to convey
information to the public. Campaign websites gave Gore
and Bush a venue for communicating their message to a
wider audience, and the political dotcoms pushed
election coverage to voters via centralized sites.

These new uses for the Internet did not reinvent
democracy. On the contrary, they merely added the
Internet to campaigners' toolboxes -- as another way for
candidates to reach voters. The Internet's capacity to
cheaply and efficiently connect the one to the many had
already been acknowledged; its use in the 2000 election
was just one application of this blanket concept.

Election 2004: Using the Internet for Voter Meetups and
Campaign-Building

Fast-forward to Election 2004 -- where the idea is not
one-to-many, but many-to-many. Today's campaigns and
dotcoms harness the Internet to allow voters to talk to
one another, not simply to receive information from the
candidate's campaign.

Blogs, Forums, Meetups, and the Moveon.org TV ad
competition are all many-to-many communication
mechanisms. Each empowers citizens -- through technology
such as blogging; Web development software; community
design tools; and photo, graphics and movie development
programs -- to partake in the democratic process. The
result is not only online discourse, but also face-to-
face debate among voters, and creative and artistic
messaging among voters as well.

The Limit on the Dean Campaign's Approach:
Centralization

The many-to-many concept used in Election 2004 is a
major innovation. But it is far from all the potential
the Internet offers when it comes to elections. Why?
Because the discourse, debate, and artistry are still
all centralized.

Each campaign has a single official website, and a
single, centralized official blog. The Dean campaign has
a tool to create more Dean-centric blogs, but then each,
itself, is a centralized forum.

I don't mean to knock the Dean campaign: Its innovative
techniques -- soon copied by other campaigns -- brought
new citizen-voters into the traditional electioneering
process. In terms of voter participation and
involvement, the brilliant Deaniacs' strategies
represented a giant leap forward from the typical
controlled, public relations- packaged campaign. (Think
of Karl Rove's masterminding of the George W. Bush
presidential candidacy.)

Nevertheless, even the Dean campaign still maintains a
centralized, filtered, top-down approach to
electioneering. They tout the 181,555 Dean supporters
who attend Meetup.com's Meetup for Dean -- but these
occur only once a month, on the day the organization
chooses, with the organizer receiving a script from the
campaign. Similarly, the next Dean House parties will
all occur during the Superbowl.

More examples -- from all of the campaigns, and
independent sites such as Moveon.org -- abound. The
letter-writing campaigns to voters in Iowa and New
Hampshire are coordinated through a centralized resource
of voter addresses. The Moveon.org-initiated movies were
all sent to Moveon.org, which coordinated the voting and
raised money to broadcast a single winner.

In each case, innovation had to proceed through a
centralized funnel. By comparison, think of an Internet
that itself was built on proprietary protocols, where
all traffic had to be routed through ATT, funneled
through AOL, or okayed by Disney. Fortunately, our own
Internet isn't a funnel; it's a "web" or "net" instead.

The Real Revolution That Is Yet to Come:
Decentralization

What would decentralization look like, in the context of
Internet elections? As Oliver Wendell Holmes taught in
the context of First Amendment law, a democracy is best
served by allowing for the largest marketplace of ideas.
The idea would be to create that marketplace.

Dave Winer, advocate of the citizen-blogger and editor
of the Scripting News weblog, explained it this way:
Currently, the Dean campaign might choose a blogger who
supports Dean, and put him on the Dean bus to blog about
the campaign's day. But there's a key difference between
that, and having hundreds of citizen bloggers who attend
Dean events, writing their impressions--good or bad-- on
their own blogs. And it is the latter that's
revolutionary.

Or consider it another way: In a sense, a candidate
website allows millions to have one conversation. But
what about the alternative of smaller groups having a
million diverse conversations -- with the best
conversations attracting the most participants, and the
best arguments convincing the most people?

In these many conversations, voters can deliberate as to
campaign strategies, policies, and even candidates. A
candidate's official site will never be able to be as
frank about his or her weaknesses as an independent
discussion among voters can be; yet addressing these
weaknesses may be the only way to convince undecideds.

Similarly, Moveon.org chooses the "best" campaign ad and
promotes it. But what if, instead, every citizen would
create her own TV advertisement endorsing their
candidate and post it on their own website? The funnel
of the competition would be eliminated, for the better.

Of course, the worst ads might only get a few hits. But
the best ads will get more, organically, as links are
forwarded to friends, admired on blogs, or referenced by
high-hit sites. And terrific ads that might not have
suited Moveon.org's judges will still receive exposure.

Why Decentralization Can Be A Hard Sell

This is not an easy sell. Currently, the ultimate
electioneering end game is considered to be -- for
instance --- a 30 second ad broadcast during the State
of the Union, or a feature on the Nightly News that will
be viewed by millions. If you need to raise $1.7 million
to make the State of the Union ad happen, than
centralized fund raising and selection is required. And
if you are aiming for that feature, you may need a
slick, expensive public relations package to merit Tom
Brokaw's attention.

You may also feel that your resources are better spent
amplifying the biggest supporters' voices, rather than
providing a venue for debate amongst voters themselves.
But the Dean campaign has already proved this view
shortsighted, and decentralized Internet techniques are
likely to undermine it even more.

The brilliance of the Internet's own decentralized
design can be translated to the design of decentralized
campaigning. But many arguments will be raised against
doing this. Voters should be wary, for they will be the
very same arguments that were raised against a non-
proprietary Internet: Without property there can be no
price discrimination; not all content is created equal;
and private control spurs competition.

When it comes to Internet elections, however, those
arguments are as wrong now as they always were. A
competition of ideas need not be linked to proprietary
candidate websites and blogs. And voters can sort out
content for themselves; they don't need official
websites or approved scripts to do it for them.

Democracy Requires Decentralized Discourse

In the true "Internet Election" no campaign, national
committee, or organization will decide where and when
the conversations take place, who participates, or what
is the agenda.

>From many conversations, the best arguments and the best
arguers will gain traction. Some may jump to other
conversations to increase interest in their issues, and
others may leave because they're still not convinced.
Barriers to entry in any conversation will be low;
listening will be valued as much as speaking; and the
best ideas will survive because the market for them will
only grow.

In the end, voters will turn out to vote in higher
numbers because they chose the candidates and policies
at issue, on their own terms and timelines.
Disillusionment and jadedness about politics will
decrease sharply.

In Election 2000, we saw the Internet's power to amplify
one-to-many communications. In Election 2004, we're
seeing the Internet's power to enable many-to- many
conversations. The lesson of the Iowa primary should not
be that the Internet matters less than we thought -- it
should be, instead, that transforming democracy requires
something more than even the laudable efforts the Dean
campaign has used so far.

It may be that the politicians and pundits cannot ignore
the seductive, tried and true politics of centralized
control, in favor of decentralization. And it is likely
that decentralization will need to happen -- and succeed
-- on the local level before it moves national.

But I'm betting that win or lose, the Deaniacs and a
posse of new eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old voters
will be back in four years, staging what history deems
the real "Internet Election."

---

Lauren Gelman has written, commented and lectured on
Internet Law issues since 1995. She is currently the
Assistant Director of Stanford Law School's Center for
Internet and Society where she is responsible for the
daily operations of the Center, litigation and policy
projects with students in the Cyberlaw Clinic, and for
directing and conducting research on the interaction of
new technologies and the law.

Please send all comments to practice@findlaw.com or give
us your opinion at the Modern Practice discussion board.

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<HTML><FONT FACE=3Darial,helvetica><HTML><BODY BGCOLOR=3D"#ffffff"><FONT  CO=
LOR=3D"#000040" BACK=3D"#ffffff" style=3D"BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=
=3D2 PTSIZE=3D10 FAMILY=3D"SANSSERIF" FACE=3D"Arial" LANG=3D"0">End of 'Inte=
rnet elections'? Don't count on it<BR>
By Lauren Gelman<BR>
<BR>
February 2004<BR>
&lt;http://practice.findlaw.com/feature-0204.html&gt;<BR>
<BR>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Does Howard Dean's Third-Place Finish in Iowa Rebut=
<BR>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the "Internet Election" Concept? Don't Count on It<=
BR>
<BR>
The results of Iowa Primary were shocking to many:<BR>
Howard Dean, widely expected to finish first, or at<BR>
least second, came in a weak third. Since Dean was seen<BR>
as the Internet candidate, his finish will doubtless<BR>
spur a flurry of debate on whether the Internet is<BR>
capable, after all, of transforming democracy.<BR>
<BR>
Has the Internet's influence in Election 2004 been<BR>
overhyped? Some have suggested that while the Internet<BR>
is a valuable tool for organizing and fundraising, it's<BR>
no match for the big media or on-the-ground campaigning<BR>
necessary to change voters' minds. But let's not<BR>
relegate the Internet's impact on American elections to<BR>
a footnote just yet.<BR>
<BR>
Blog for America, Meetup.com, and Moveon.org are<BR>
significant steps towards capturing the Internet's<BR>
potential to transform American politics. Each empowered<BR>
the citizen to participate in the political conversation<BR>
and campaign in a manner never before experienced. But<BR>
they have only begun to suggest the Internet's power to<BR>
transform the democratic process.<BR>
<BR>
We have yet to experience the true "Internet Election."<BR>
In that election, the Internet will not simply be a tool<BR>
for electioneering. Rather, the Internet's design will<BR>
itself be a prototype for democratic discourse and<BR>
decisionmaking -- as I will explain.<BR>
<BR>
Election 2000: Using the Internet to Convey Information<BR>
<BR>
It's helpful to remember that the first "Internet<BR>
Election" actually took place years ago, in 2000 -- the<BR>
midst of the dot com boom. Then, the Internet was hailed<BR>
for its ability to allow campaigns to reach more people<BR>
with more information.<BR>
<BR>
In Washington D.C., where I lived during that campaign<BR>
season, buzz about how the Internet was transforming<BR>
democracy was everywhere. Campaign web sites, launch<BR>
parties for Voter.com and Grassroots.com, and political<BR>
banner ads foretold the birth of the "Internet<BR>
Election"--or so said the pundits.<BR>
<BR>
Election 2000 was supposed to be "It": proof the<BR>
Internet would transform democracy. On this view, before<BR>
the Internet, campaigning was a mega-media dominated<BR>
enterprise of high-powered consultants, corrupt ballot-<BR>
box stuffing precinct bosses and poll-driven candidates.<BR>
But after the Internet, campaigning would become a<BR>
democratic utopia where every voter has a megaphone,<BR>
candidates deliberate carefully, and campaigns respond<BR>
to voters' individual voices.<BR>
<BR>
Of course, that vision did not realize itself that year.<BR>
And today, Voter.com is bankrupt, blogs have replaced<BR>
banner ads, and those campaign websites look quaint to a<BR>
broadband-addicted public.<BR>
<BR>
What happened? While evolutionary and innovative, the<BR>
Web trends of the late nineties emphasized a model in<BR>
which the Internet would be employed simply to convey<BR>
information to the public. Campaign websites gave Gore<BR>
and Bush a venue for communicating their message to a<BR>
wider audience, and the political dotcoms pushed<BR>
election coverage to voters via centralized sites.<BR>
<BR>
These new uses for the Internet did not reinvent<BR>
democracy. On the contrary, they merely added the<BR>
Internet to campaigners' toolboxes -- as another way for<BR>
candidates to reach voters. The Internet's capacity to<BR>
cheaply and efficiently connect the one to the many had<BR>
already been acknowledged; its use in the 2000 election<BR>
was just one application of this blanket concept.<BR>
<BR>
Election 2004: Using the Internet for Voter Meetups and<BR>
Campaign-Building<BR>
<BR>
Fast-forward to Election 2004 -- where the idea is not<BR>
one-to-many, but many-to-many. Today's campaigns and<BR>
dotcoms harness the Internet to allow voters to talk to<BR>
one another, not simply to receive information from the<BR>
candidate's campaign.<BR>
<BR>
Blogs, Forums, Meetups, and the Moveon.org TV ad<BR>
competition are all many-to-many communication<BR>
mechanisms. Each empowers citizens -- through technology<BR>
such as blogging; Web development software; community<BR>
design tools; and photo, graphics and movie development<BR>
programs -- to partake in the democratic process. The<BR>
result is not only online discourse, but also face-to-<BR>
face debate among voters, and creative and artistic<BR>
messaging among voters as well.<BR>
<BR>
The Limit on the Dean Campaign's Approach:<BR>
Centralization<BR>
<BR>
The many-to-many concept used in Election 2004 is a<BR>
major innovation. But it is far from all the potential<BR>
the Internet offers when it comes to elections. Why?<BR>
Because the discourse, debate, and artistry are still<BR>
all centralized.<BR>
<BR>
Each campaign has a single official website, and a<BR>
single, centralized official blog. The Dean campaign has<BR>
a tool to create more Dean-centric blogs, but then each,<BR>
itself, is a centralized forum.<BR>
<BR>
I don't mean to knock the Dean campaign: Its innovative<BR>
techniques -- soon copied by other campaigns -- brought<BR>
new citizen-voters into the traditional electioneering<BR>
process. In terms of voter participation and<BR>
involvement, the brilliant Deaniacs' strategies<BR>
represented a giant leap forward from the typical<BR>
controlled, public relations- packaged campaign. (Think<BR>
of Karl Rove's masterminding of the George W. Bush<BR>
presidential candidacy.)<BR>
<BR>
Nevertheless, even the Dean campaign still maintains a<BR>
centralized, filtered, top-down approach to<BR>
electioneering. They tout the 181,555 Dean supporters<BR>
who attend Meetup.com's Meetup for Dean -- but these<BR>
occur only once a month, on the day the organization<BR>
chooses, with the organizer receiving a script from the<BR>
campaign. Similarly, the next Dean House parties will<BR>
all occur during the Superbowl.<BR>
<BR>
More examples -- from all of the campaigns, and<BR>
independent sites such as Moveon.org -- abound. The<BR>
letter-writing campaigns to voters in Iowa and New<BR>
Hampshire are coordinated through a centralized resource<BR>
of voter addresses. The Moveon.org-initiated movies were<BR>
all sent to Moveon.org, which coordinated the voting and<BR>
raised money to broadcast a single winner.<BR>
<BR>
In each case, innovation had to proceed through a<BR>
centralized funnel. By comparison, think of an Internet<BR>
that itself was built on proprietary protocols, where<BR>
all traffic had to be routed through ATT, funneled<BR>
through AOL, or okayed by Disney. Fortunately, our own<BR>
Internet isn't a funnel; it's a "web" or "net" instead.<BR>
<BR>
The Real Revolution That Is Yet to Come:<BR>
Decentralization<BR>
<BR>
What would decentralization look like, in the context of<BR>
Internet elections? As Oliver Wendell Holmes taught in<BR>
the context of First Amendment law, a democracy is best<BR>
served by allowing for the largest marketplace of ideas.<BR>
The idea would be to create that marketplace.<BR>
<BR>
Dave Winer, advocate of the citizen-blogger and editor<BR>
of the Scripting News weblog, explained it this way:<BR>
Currently, the Dean campaign might choose a blogger who<BR>
supports Dean, and put him on the Dean bus to blog about<BR>
the campaign's day. But there's a key difference between<BR>
that, and having hundreds of citizen bloggers who attend<BR>
Dean events, writing their impressions--good or bad-- on<BR>
their own blogs. And it is the latter that's<BR>
revolutionary.<BR>
<BR>
Or consider it another way: In a sense, a candidate<BR>
website allows millions to have one conversation. But<BR>
what about the alternative of smaller groups having a<BR>
million diverse conversations -- with the best<BR>
conversations attracting the most participants, and the<BR>
best arguments convincing the most people?<BR>
<BR>
In these many conversations, voters can deliberate as to<BR>
campaign strategies, policies, and even candidates. A<BR>
candidate's official site will never be able to be as<BR>
frank about his or her weaknesses as an independent<BR>
discussion among voters can be; yet addressing these<BR>
weaknesses may be the only way to convince undecideds.<BR>
<BR>
Similarly, Moveon.org chooses the "best" campaign ad and<BR>
promotes it. But what if, instead, every citizen would<BR>
create her own TV advertisement endorsing their<BR>
candidate and post it on their own website? The funnel<BR>
of the competition would be eliminated, for the better.<BR>
<BR>
Of course, the worst ads might only get a few hits. But<BR>
the best ads will get more, organically, as links are<BR>
forwarded to friends, admired on blogs, or referenced by<BR>
high-hit sites. And terrific ads that might not have<BR>
suited Moveon.org's judges will still receive exposure.<BR>
<BR>
Why Decentralization Can Be A Hard Sell<BR>
<BR>
This is not an easy sell. Currently, the ultimate<BR>
electioneering end game is considered to be -- for<BR>
instance --- a 30 second ad broadcast during the State<BR>
of the Union, or a feature on the Nightly News that will<BR>
be viewed by millions. If you need to raise $1.7 million<BR>
to make the State of the Union ad happen, than<BR>
centralized fund raising and selection is required. And<BR>
if you are aiming for that feature, you may need a<BR>
slick, expensive public relations package to merit Tom<BR>
Brokaw's attention.<BR>
<BR>
You may also feel that your resources are better spent<BR>
amplifying the biggest supporters' voices, rather than<BR>
providing a venue for debate amongst voters themselves.<BR>
But the Dean campaign has already proved this view<BR>
shortsighted, and decentralized Internet techniques are<BR>
likely to undermine it even more.<BR>
<BR>
The brilliance of the Internet's own decentralized<BR>
design can be translated to the design of decentralized<BR>
campaigning. But many arguments will be raised against<BR>
doing this. Voters should be wary, for they will be the<BR>
very same arguments that were raised against a non-<BR>
proprietary Internet: Without property there can be no<BR>
price discrimination; not all content is created equal;<BR>
and private control spurs competition.<BR>
<BR>
When it comes to Internet elections, however, those<BR>
arguments are as wrong now as they always were. A<BR>
competition of ideas need not be linked to proprietary<BR>
candidate websites and blogs. And voters can sort out<BR>
content for themselves; they don't need official<BR>
websites or approved scripts to do it for them.<BR>
<BR>
Democracy Requires Decentralized Discourse<BR>
<BR>
In the true "Internet Election" no campaign, national<BR>
committee, or organization will decide where and when<BR>
the conversations take place, who participates, or what<BR>
is the agenda.<BR>
<BR>
>From many conversations, the best arguments and the best<BR>
arguers will gain traction. Some may jump to other<BR>
conversations to increase interest in their issues, and<BR>
others may leave because they're still not convinced.<BR>
Barriers to entry in any conversation will be low;<BR>
listening will be valued as much as speaking; and the<BR>
best ideas will survive because the market for them will<BR>
only grow.<BR>
<BR>
In the end, voters will turn out to vote in higher<BR>
numbers because they chose the candidates and policies<BR>
at issue, on their own terms and timelines.<BR>
Disillusionment and jadedness about politics will<BR>
decrease sharply.<BR>
<BR>
In Election 2000, we saw the Internet's power to amplify<BR>
one-to-many communications. In Election 2004, we're<BR>
seeing the Internet's power to enable many-to- many<BR>
conversations. The lesson of the Iowa primary should not<BR>
be that the Internet matters less than we thought -- it<BR>
should be, instead, that transforming democracy requires<BR>
something more than even the laudable efforts the Dean<BR>
campaign has used so far.<BR>
<BR>
It may be that the politicians and pundits cannot ignore<BR>
the seductive, tried and true politics of centralized<BR>
control, in favor of decentralization. And it is likely<BR>
that decentralization will need to happen -- and succeed<BR>
-- on the local level before it moves national.<BR>
<BR>
But I'm betting that win or lose, the Deaniacs and a<BR>
posse of new eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old voters<BR>
will be back in four years, staging what history deems<BR>
the real "Internet Election."<BR>
<BR>
---<BR>
<BR>
Lauren Gelman has written, commented and lectured on<BR>
Internet Law issues since 1995. She is currently the<BR>
Assistant Director of Stanford Law School's Center for<BR>
Internet and Society where she is responsible for the<BR>
daily operations of the Center, litigation and policy<BR>
projects with students in the Cyberlaw Clinic, and for<BR>
directing and conducting research on the interaction of<BR>
new technologies and the law.<BR>
<BR>
Please send all comments to practice@findlaw.com or give<BR>
us your opinion at the Modern Practice discussion board.<BR>
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