By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 8, 2005; 10:26 AM

2005 promises most Americans a well-deserved -- if brief -- respite from the political spin cycle. Aside from gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia and some other odd-year contests, it's time for big party machines to analyze the post-game video and get ready for the mid-term congressional elections in 2006.

That's not the case for everyone, however, and at least one state is buzzing with online political activity. As the Associated Press reported, some politicians are experimenting with Weblogs to shake up districts known for predictable party-line votes.

The AP story takes place in Ohio, where liberal activist Chris Baker is trying to use blogs and other word-of-mouth techniques to muster support for a progressive candidate. The 2nd District, where Baker is working, provides the rare off-cycle opportunity to try something new after seven-term Republican Rep. Rob Portman joined the Bush administration as U.S. trade representative.

Eleven Republicans and five Democrats are jostling to fill Portman's shoes, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, creating a pool of voters who could be receptive to messages delivered in original ways that set them apart from the competition.

Baker and his Republican counterparts said they believe the GOP will hold the 2nd District, though the Cincinnati Post reported that most of those candidates will have to struggle to distinguish themselves: "Of the 11 Republican candidates, four ... are widely viewed as the presumptive frontrunners. ... The other seven, most of them first-time candidates, offer a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences. Drawn from both the district's urban centers and remote rural outposts, they include several teachers, a part-time letter carrier, a former government worker, a lawyer, a financial analyst and a professional magician. ... Their best hope -- perhaps their only hope -- is for the better-known candidates to so seriously splinter the vote that a dark horse could perhaps slip through."

The AP said that in a field like this, liberal activist Baker will use the race "as spring training for the 2006 midterm elections and 2008 presidential contest. Baker posts reports and commentary on the campaign along with appeals from the candidates for volunteers and money. In one recent post, Baker referred to Republicans' efforts to court religious conservatives as a 'truly pathetic display,' and he continually refers to some Republicans as serving the Sith lord villains of 'Star Wars' movies."

Two of the 2nd District candidates, Bob McEwen (R) and Victoria Wulsin (D) started their own campaign blogs. The story includes a summary of Howard Dean's partially blog-fueled ascendancy during the last presidential campaign, and offered some other e-politics examples as well. It noted Kentucky Rep. Ben Chandler's (D) congressional victory, spurred in part by raising $80,000 from two weeks' worth of ads that his campaign placed on the Daily Kos blog.

Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham smacked down maverick rival and former subordinate Seth Williams in her race for reelection last month, but the papers in the City of Brotherly Love already have identified Williams as the blogging candidate.

Though Abraham took 56 percent of the vote to Williams's 44 percent, he is getting credit for trying out new media. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story on his blogging base in May: "Williams strategists say they believe the bloggers provide at least a modest counterweight to ... Abraham's power. [Abraham] is a 14-year veteran who has plenty of campaign cash -- but so far no bloggers -- and the support of Democratic Party ward leaders. 'The bloggers tend to be leaders,' said Ray Murphy, who runs Williams's Internet operation. 'I think of them as carrier pigeons spreading the word.'"

Well, it didn't quite work out, though Williams did raise more than $3,000 through the blogs.

Here is Philly1.com with some analysis, both positive and negative: "Williams does leave one substantial political legacy in the wake of defeat. He was the first Philadelphia politician to make a systemic effort to mobilize bloggers, many highly ideological, on behalf of his campaign. Obviously, there is no way to precisely evaluate how many votes the bloggers may have affected. One downside is that bloggers tend to reach politically sophisticated people - people who enjoy spending their free time reading about political issues. And thus, the people who would LEAST be likely to be swayed by campaigning."

The Inquirer quoted one city politics expert whose comment seems to buttress that analysis: "'He needs to raise some money and build up a community profile,' said J. Whyatt Mondesire, president of the city chapter of the NAACP. 'He did better than anticipated, but what hurt him is not having a community base.'" The story said Williams carried all but one of the city wards that have an African-American voting majority.

Also remember that Philadelphia's ambitious plan to equip the entire city with wireless Internet access is being done in part to serve such wards, where many people live below the poverty line and cannot afford private in-home access at current prices.

Imagine if Willie Stark had hired Jack Burden as his full-time blogging coordinator. Better yet, let's not. There are plenty of elected officials running around these days who owe some debt of gratitude to cyberspace, and according to Michael Cornfield of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, President Bush is one.

Speaking at an online media and marketing conference run by MediaPost, Cornfield said the 2004 Bush campaign "married software to Tupperware." More from MediaPost: "Bush's camp, said Cornfeld [sic], used the Internet to find volunteers and then gave them information to spread -- via any medium at hand -- to friends and neighbors."

The site's editors ran a hyperbolic headline -- "Pew Consultant: Bush Owes Victory to Internet." If that's all it took to win the top office in the United States, no one would need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to sway the outcome. But never mind, we see what they're getting at.

One politician who thanked the Internet for all it's done for him is Al Gore. The former vice president and Democratic also-ran in the 2000 presidential race accepted a Webby Tuesday night in New York.

David Carr of the New York Times reported: "One of the more charming idiosyncrasies of the Webby Awards, the annual awards for achievement in Web creation, requires that recipients use five words, and five words only, to make their acceptance speeches. So after a night full of award innuendos and one-line haiku at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, the 550 people in attendance were wondering how Al Gore, the loquacious former vice president, would respond to his lifetime achievement award. He did not disappoint.

"'Please don't recount this vote,' he said. The place went nuts."

Gore took a lot of flak in 2000 for a comment he made that implied that he invented the Internet, so it was only natural that so-called father of the Internet Vinton Cerf introduced him at the awards banquet with the five-word speech, "We all invented the Internet."

The Webbys, which recognize the best of the Internet from incorporated to incoherent, have been around since 1997. Here are this year's winners and nominees.

I reported a couple of weeks ago that Miami-Dade elections officials were considering whether to dump the county's $24.5 million iVotronic paperless voting system. Lester Sola, the county's elections supervisor, wrote in a May 27 report that the operational costs, not to mention the great, big controversy surrounding their accuracy and the possibility of fixing an election, were enough to convince him that older Optical Scan machines were the way to go.

Now the trend is spreading. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that Volusia County Council members scotched a contract intended to bring touchscreen voting machines into their county.

"Intended to meet a state deadline for disabled-accessible voting, the touch screens vexed voters who want something the machines don't produce -- a paper ballot. But in trying to keep a lock on the ballot box, the council may have opened itself to a conflict with the state and disabled advocacy groups," the paper wrote. "'I have to live with my conscience, and I feel I did the right thing,' said County Chairman Frank Bruno, one of four council members to vote against the $782,185 contract with Diebold Election Systems."

The News-Journal editorial board called the move a brave one that actually benefits all voters, disabled or not: "Election officials in Florida -- especially those who endured the 2000 presidential election -- should be aware of the value of fair, verifiable, secure balloting. Touch-screen machines ... may be a viable alternative at some point, but without a voter-verified paper receipt of individual ballots, they don't meet that basic democratic test."

The Orlando Sentinel detailed Diebold senior attorney Michael Lindross's Edmund Muskie moment, proving that the Ohio company's commitment to paperless voting is more than a job, it's a passion: "Diebold executives in attendance said they have never seen a county back out of a contract for voting machines at the last minute as Volusia did. ... At one point, [Lindross] choked back tears as he defended his company's long track record in the security business. He noted that [county officials] worked out a better agreement than the one Diebold has with the Smithsonian Institution to protect the Hope Diamond."

Note to all you voting conspiracy theorists out there: Diebold executives have feelings too.

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