Posted on 02/10/2004 1:14:55 AM PST by calcowgirl
PASADENA -- Jeff Marksbury was paying no attention to the race for Los Angeles County District Attorney until two weeks ago, when one of the candidates sent him an unsolicited e-mail.
But the 56-year-old Pasadena computer systems analyst was sure of one thing after the second one arrived: He would vote against the candidate who had sent it.
More galling to Marksbury was that his e-mail address, along with thousands of others, had been sold to the campaign by the county Registrar-Recorder's Office.
"I work in the data processing business and all of us my clients, myself are plagued with spam,' Marksbury said. "Here I have my government collecting e-mail addresses and turning around and selling them.'
A public inundated by unsolicited and often offensive e-mail pitches may resist picking out the political ads, dumping the whole lot in the virtual trash bin. But experts predict the Internet revolution means a wave of political spam is headed for your inbox.
The campaign e-mail Marksbury received came from Anthony Patchett, a Glendale attorney and former deputy district attorney seeking to unseat District Attorney Steve Cooley.
Short on funds and name recognition, Patchett's advisers decided to contract with AMAC Information and Graphics of Redondo Beach. The company bought a voter registration list from the county elections office and targeted e-mails to likely voters.
Patchett said he has received mixed responses to the e-mails, but hopes it will help him take second place in the March 2 primary.
"All I am doing is going on their advice and their strategy,' Patchett said. "I am a novice to politics, so therefore I rely on people who have been doing this for 15 years.'
Michael Luna, vice president of AMAC, said the company only recently has started using e- mails in local campaigns. "It's an inexpensive way for these countywide candidates who don't have the money to do mailing or television,' he said.
"I know a lot of people think of it negatively, but it really is a grass-roots tool.'
Luna said his company makes clear in every e-mail that the recipients can remove their name from the list. "We don't like spam ourselves,' he said.
AMAC and several other companies buy voter registration lists from county and state elections offices. Marksbury calls it "government-assisted spam.'
The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder sells the complete voter registration list for $146. The price is $54 for a particular political jurisdiction.
"If the voter provided an e-mail address and we have that on file, they would get that information as well,' said Grace Chavez, spokeswoman for the county elections office.
The Secretary of State began collecting e-mail addresses in October 2000 in response to state legislation, though giving the information is optional.
In an era when the need for wads of campaign cash is widely seen as freezing out political neophytes and alternative party candidates, mass e-mailing offers a cheap alternative.
"For democracy to do well, you want the process to be as inexpensive as possible, and e-mail is the cheapest way to do it,' said Carol Darr, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.
At the leading edge of Internet politics is former Gov. Howard Dean, who rose from relative obscurity to become a key player in the Democratic presidential primary. Most political observers credit his success to his campaign's deft use of the Internet in raising funds and building grass-roots support.
While Dean may be sliding back to obscurity, the methods he used have changed the face of politics forever, Darr said. She even credits his success with emboldening Gen. Wesley Clark to jump into the race.
Internet campaigns are not limited to Democrats. According to news reports, President Bush plans to deploy hundreds of thousands of e-mails in key states in his re-election bid. The president's campaign team has gathered 600,000 addresses in Ohio alone.
But political spam is even more likely to come from candidates running for lower profile offices: judges, district attorneys, controllers, assessors. These are the races that do not make the front page of newspapers and are not covered by TV.
"People despise spam, me included,' Darr said. But, like the stranger handing out fliers at the supermarket or the mass mail that comes to your home, unwanted solicitations are vital to the democratic process, she said.
Former California Secretary of State Bill Jones was one of the first statewide candidates to experiment with unsolicited campaign e-mail when he ran for governor in last year's recall race.
After several complaints were sent to the Internet company hosting his Web site, he was warned to stop.
Matt Grossman, researcher for the Institute for Government Studies at UC Berkeley, said the backlash against Jones shows the risk campaigns face in using unsolicited e-mail.
Instead, he said campaigns are more likely to the "chain letter'-style of e-mail solicitation, where one person interested in a candidate is asked to send information on to friends. This worked effectively in Dean's campaign as well as former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.
The rise of Internet-based campaigning prompted the California Legislature to form the Bipartisan California Commission on Internet Political Practices in 2000 to study its effects and recommend ways to regulate the process.
Chaired by USC Annenberg School president Geoffrey Cowan, the commission concluded the government should place as few restrictions as possible on political uses of the Internet to allow the technology to flourish.
"In some respects, the Internet has now become the driving force behind innovations in campaigning,' the commission report says. "We think that the government should resist calls for excessive requirements that could unnecessarily ... inhibit or criminalize citizen participation in politics via the Internet.'
Both the state and federal governments have passed anti-spam legislation. While there are First Amendment issues clouding enforcement, experts say the legislation only deals with commercial speech, leaving political spam untouched.
Gary Scott can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4458, or by e-mail at gary.scott@sgvn.com
My registrar in Houston only has my name and local address. When I vote in the Republican primary, I get stamped as a "Republican" and I believe that the Republican party can then get my home address from the register as a "Republican".
"The Secretary of State began collecting e-mail addresses in October 2000 in response to state legislation, though giving the information is optional.'
Bill Jones ran for governor in the regular primary in 2002. He had trouble raising money, and sent the spam that year as a cheaper form of advertisement. Several no-name candidates in the 2003 recall election sent spam, but Jones did not even run last year.
Jones probably got his email list from spam companies, not from the registrars of voters, since many non-Californians also received the unsolicited campaign spam.
After several complaints were sent to the Internet company hosting his Web site, he was warned to stop.
Not only that, IIRC, his campaign website was shut down. Perhaps his website host did not condone spamming? This happened in the final weeks of the Primary campaign in 2002.
A couple days ago, I briefly looked to see if he had a website for this campaign. I didn't find it.
Has his experience soured him to the internet?
Bill Jones
http://www.jonesforcalifornia.com/
Toni Casey
http://www.tonicaseyforsenate.com/
Interesting poll from Jones website (surprise, surprise!):
What do you think are the most important issues
facing California and the United States?
Health Care: 9%
Environment: 16%
Security: 19%
Immigration: 45%
Education: 11%
432 total votes
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