THE CUTTING EDGE : The Digital Soapbox : Candidates and Groups Go On Line to Get Message Out

When Zeb Rice’s mother, Kathleen Brown, decided to run for governor, the 23-year-old college student wrote a memo to the campaign explaining why it needed an Internet account. Cheap propaganda outlet. Direct access. Hip, future-looking image. The student vote.

It sounded good, but nobody could figure out what he was talking about. So he ended up doing it himself, “telnet-ing” into campaign headquarters from school in Maine, and later coming to Los Angeles to answer e-mail--a task he finds far preferable to dealing with “snail mail” or the phones.

Brown’s early on-line excursions--her economic plan, the texts of her speeches and her bumper sticker are all accessible from her site on the Net--helped shape what has become California’s first election year in cyberspace.

In a trend that political activists say could vastly increase the amount of information available to voters and even democratize its distribution, dozens of candidates and nonprofit political organizations across the country have set up podiums on the electronic frontier over the last few months.

Bill Clinton and George Bush may have made brief appearances on commercial on-line services two years ago--and Ross Perot used electronic bulletin boards to get his message out--but this year’s political offerings are far more extensive.

True-believing on-line activists see in the electronic revolution the potential to transform the very nature of political debate. They like to point out that the form of communication provided by the medium is “many to many,” as opposed to the telephone’s “point to point” or the “point to many” of mass media such as radio, television and newspapers.

“Previous technologies kept power in the hands of the candidates,” says Mark Bonchek, a graduate student at Harvard University who is writing his dissertation on how interactive media can be used to facilitate political participation. “In this context, you put all the information on line, and people get to browse and choose what they want to see. That’s a shift in power as measured by control of information away from the campaign and toward the citizens.”

California, home to Silicon Valley and an estimated 1 million Internet users, is at the forefront of the on-line electoral activity. Last week, the California secretary of state’s office said it has teamed up with Digital Equipment Corp. to provide the first real-time election returns on the World Wide Web, a portion of the Internet that can display pictures and graphics.

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The full text of the California ballot pamphlet, which the state spends about $5 million printing and sending out to voters, is stored on the DEC computer, along with additional information on each candidate. Acting Secretary of State Tony Miller said 21,000 computer users logged on to the site last week in one day alone.

More than 5,000 prospective voters have logged on to the nonprofit California Voter Foundation’s Online Voter Guide, which offers candidate information on each of the nine statewide races, job descriptions of statewide offices and California Journal magazine reviews of propositions 181 through 188. It cost $20,000--half supplied by Pacific Bell--to put thousands of pages of information on line.

“This could be the beginning of a revolution in the way campaigns are conducted,” says Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation. “California has 14 million registered voters. To get a message out to voters, you have to raise a huge amount of money to use the mediums candidates traditionally use. My thought was, let’s come up with an alternate way for candidates to disseminate information.”

U.S. Senate candidate Dianne Feinstein as well as Libertarians Richard Boddie and Richard Rider each have a presence on the Internet, and e-mail can be sent to Gov. Pete Wilson at petewilson@delphi.com.

To be sure, only a small fraction of California’s voters now have access to commercial on-line services such as Prodigy or the global network of computers known as the Internet. And those who do tend to be college students--most of whom are provided with free Internet accounts--or from high-income brackets.

And not all candidates are enamored with the Internet. Senate candidate Michael Huffington spent millions of his personal fortune on his campaign but has no significant presence on line. Wilson spokesman Dan Schnur said the governor felt an e-mail address was enough: “We’ve generally found that if people are interested in specific information they’ll ask for it, and then we’re happy to provide it by the regular means.”

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But with the number of personal computers in homes expected to double over the next three years, the importance of on-line political activity can only grow. Political debate has traditionally been a mainstay of the techie set that has until recently dominated the on-line world.

Political forums on the Internet include “alt.radical-left,” “alt.revolution.counter,” “alt.rush-limbaugh” and “alt.politics.correct.” Libertarians and the Net’s own political creation, “cypherpunks,” are hard to miss. Organizations on the far left and right ends of the political spectrum that are largely cut out of the mainstream media have found the on-line world a fertile recruiting ground and an inexpensive way to get their message out.

During the genesis of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, for example, communiques from the group’s leaders were quickly disseminated by anarchist and other leftist groups via the Internet. And the Simon Wiesenthal Center is conducting a study on the increasing activity by white supremacist hate groups on the Internet.

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But as more Americans gain access, mainstream politics may come to dominate the on-line world as well.

At the Brown campaign, Rice sticks to the “ca.politics” forum, where debates rage on everything from immigration to “Why do we have such repulsive candidates?” He judges the impact of his mother’s on-line efforts as “mostly symbolic,” but he looks forward to the day when all voters are on line.

“Snail mail is a nightmare. We get all these letters--it’s an incredibly complex process which requires tons and tons of steps. It’s expensive--you have to print out the paper, she has to sign them, read them, categorize them. We wish everyone would communicate via e-mail with us. It’s infinitely easier.”

Political Technology, High and Low

Politics are on the information highway this election, with candidates putting up pages on the Internet and on-line services such as America Online and Prodigy offering special election sections. Even President Clinton has an e-mail address. But politicians have always jumped on new technology. Some highlights from history: * The printed ballot: This modern convenience was first authorized by Pennsylvania in 1799. Voters delivered their “vest pocket ticket,” which was printed by a political party and bore only the name of its candidate. * Negative advertising: Muckraking is said to have started with Thomas Jefferson, but organized efforts at character assassination began in 1828, when Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams. Among other things, “coffin handbills” accused Jackson of murdering six soldiers in the War of 1812. * The electric vote recorder: Patented by Thomas Edison in 1869, this device was first used by a legislative body on Jan. 11, 1917, in the Wisconsin Assembly Chamber. * The radio campaign: By the early 1900s, presidential candidates had come to rely on crisscrossing the country by train. But in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was very unpopular with the newspapers, boosted his cause substantially with radio and later mastered the medium with his “Fireside Chats.” * The rise of television: John F. Kennedy, in 1960, was the first presidential candidate truly at home with the medium. He clinched the election by looking better than Richard M. Nixon in a televised debate. * The electronic voting machine: On Nov. 3, 1964, the Coleman Vote Tally System counted 600 ballots a minute in Hamilton County, Ohio, and in Orange and Contra Costa counties in California. Sources: The Economist; Smithsonian Institution; Famous First Facts

On-Line Election Information

Here are some cyberspace sites that feature election information:

The Internet

* The California Online Voter Guide: From your prompt, type gopher gopher.kn.pacbell.com. The World Wide Web address is https://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ppp/home.html.

* Live election results, featuring real-time vote tabulations from the Nov. 8 elections: The WWW address is https://www.election.digital.com or https://www.election.ca.gov.

Prodigy ((800) PRODIGY)

* News BB: The place to debate key election issues. Kathleen Brown, Mario Cuomo and Oliver North take questions here.

* NewsToons: Daily selection of timely political cartoons.

America Online ((800) 827-6364)

* Capital Connection: Latest political news and discussion.

* CSPAN: Information about the C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 channels.

CompuServe ((800) 848-8990)

* Democrats: A forum for discussion of Democratic politics.

* Republican: A forum for discussion of Republican politics.

* Politics: This is the place for lively debate.

Source: Company reports Researched by ADAM S. BAUMAN / Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times