Inside the 2004 Campaign Tool Chest: Blogs and Online Voting

Maybe it’s time to start thinking about the Internet as the Swiss Army Knife of American politics. It is constantly demonstrating that it can be used in new ways.

So far, the Internet has affected campaign 2004 most powerfully on the bottom line. Following the path blazed by the giant online liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign has proved that the Internet can revolutionize the way campaigns are funded by mobilizing a mass base of small donors.

Last week, Dean announced that he had raised nearly $15.4 million in the final three months of 2003. That’s the most any Democratic presidential candidate has ever collected in a single quarter, breaking the record Dean set just three months ago.

Dean’s Internet operation has been central to that success: Online donations account for about half of the $40 million he raised in 2003. After those results, every serious campaign or cause will be searching for ways to hawk itself in cyberspace.

The Internet is also allowing candidates to maintain a deeper level of communication with their supporters than ever before. Dean’s camp has been a pioneer here, too, using Web logs, or blogs, and Meetup.com gatherings to foster an extraordinary sense of community and commitment among his backers.

But other campaigns are also showing creativity. Later this week, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark will mark a milestone in the Internet’s political development by participating in an online chat with 10 prominent blog hosts -- all of which have committed to posting the exchange on their sites. That could allow Clark to address a huge audience outside the reach of the conventional print and broadcast media, something candidates couldn’t do before the Internet’s emergence.

Then there’s Michigan, which is testing the Internet’s political value in an even more profound way.

Last week, the Michigan Democratic Party began what is probably the most ambitious experiment ever in online voting. Michigan Democrats can vote by mail or on the Internet through Feb. 7, when the party will hold its presidential caucuses. The party began accepting requests for mail and Internet ballots on its Web site at 12:01 a.m. New Year’s Day; within the first 24 hours, about some 1,500 people had signed up.

Mark Brewer, the party’s executive chair, says he expects about 400,000 people to participate in the caucuses and about two-thirds of them to vote online or through the mail. With the first ballots due back by late this week, Brewer says he anticipates “tens of thousands of votes cast” in Michigan before the Iowa caucuses formally kick off the Democratic race on Jan. 19.

No state has ever done anything quite like this. Four years ago, Arizona allowed online balloting in its Democratic presidential contest, but only for a few days before the actual primary. (No other state is offering Internet voting this year.)

The combination of Internet and mail access -- and the extended early voting period -- has fundamentally changed the nature of the competition in Michigan, placing a much greater premium on organization.

“We’re approaching this in some ways like it was the Iowa caucus,” says Ron Platt, the Michigan state director for Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri. Or at least the Iowa caucuses with a cyber-spin: The Michigan rules are inspiring unprecedented organizing strategies.

Consider the effort that the Service Employees International Union is mounting for Dean with its 40,000 members in the state. The SEIU is pitching Dean to its members through phone calls and the mail, as unions usually do. But starting today it will dispatch 35 organizers with laptops to nursing homes, hospitals and other job sites to encourage its workers to request primary ballots on the spot; then it will send the organizers back so that workers without Internet access at home can actually cast their votes over the laptops.

“I think with a heavy push, Dean may be able to have this thing locked up before walking into the caucus,” says Jerry Morrison, an SEIU official directing the effort.

The most likely near-term effect of Michigan’s Internet voting will be to benefit Gephardt, and especially Dean, the two candidates best organized to take advantage of the early voting. (A caravan of Dean supporters turned in 914 requests for ballots at the state party headquarters in Lansing on Friday.) The Internet voting will help Dean in a second way: Polls suggest it will increase the share of ballots cast by young people and college-educated voters, two groups that tend to support him.

The larger question is whether the Michigan experiment encourages more states to move elections online. One critical factor will be whether the safeguards that the party has established -- linking each vote to an individual password -- eliminate questions of fraud or manipulation.

Assuming the election crosses that hurdle, skeptics will still watch closely to see whether it skews participation away from minority voters, who government studies show are still much less likely to be connected at home to the Internet than whites.

After some minority leaders and all of the presidential contenders -- except Dean and Clark -- raised concerns about the Internet system, the party agreed to increase the number of polling places that will be open Feb. 7. And the aggressive programs from the SEIU on Dean’s behalf and other unions backing Gephardt will also attract more minority voters.

Still, even some Dean supporters -- such as Wayne County Commissioner Keith D. Williams, an African American -- worry that the Internet option, by making voting so much easier for affluent families, will dilute the influence of low-income and minority voters. Michigan’s intriguing experiment is likely to remain an exception until homes without the Internet are themselves the exception in every neighborhood.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ website at www.latimes.com/brownstein.