The Internet And National Elections

This volume represents an important contribution towards gaining a cross-national understanding of the current and emerging impacts of the Internet on political practice.

This book is a cross-national analysis of the role of the Internet in elections. It examines the role of context in shaping candidate and party usage of the Internet in democratic electoral systems.

After a self-assured John F. Kennedy bested a visibly shaky Richard Nixon in their famous 1960 debates, political television, it was said, would henceforth determine elections. Today, many claim the Internet will be the latest medium to revolutionize electoral politics. Candidates invest heavily in web and email campaigns to reach prospective voters, as well as to communicate with journalists, potential donors, and political activists. Do these efforts influence voters, expand democracy, increase the coverage of political issues, or mobilize a shrinking and apathetic electorate? Campaigning Online answers these questions by looking at how candidates present themselves online and how voters respond to their efforts-including whether voters learn from candidates' websites and whether voters' views are affected by what they see. Although the Internet will not lead to a revolution in democracy, it will, Bimber and Davis argue, have consequences: reinforcing messages, mobilizing activists, and strengthening partisans' views. Reporting on a wealth of new data drawn from national and state-wide surveys, laboratory experiments, interviews with campaign staff, and analysis of web sites themselves, Campaigning Online draws the most complete picture of the role of campaign websites in American elections to date.

This book investigates how institutional differences, such as the roles of political parties and the regulation of electoral systems, affect the development of Internet election campaigns in the U.S., Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. It examines whether or not the “Americanization of elections” is evident in East Asian democracies. While Japan is a parliamentary system, the U.S. and Korea are presidential systems and Taiwan is a semi-presidential system that has a president along with a parliamentary system. Furthermore, the role of the presidency in the U.S., Korea, and Taiwan is quite different. Taking these variations in political systems into consideration, the authors discuss how the electoral systems are regulated in relation to issues such as paid advertisements and campaign periods. They argue that stronger regulation of election systems and shorter election periods in Japan characterize Japanese uniqueness compared with the U.S., Korea, and Taiwan in terms of Internet election campaigns.

Whether responding to a CNN.com survey or voting for the NFL All-Pro team, computer users are becoming more and more comfortable with Internet polls. Computer use in the United States continues to grow—more than half of all American households now have a personal computer. The next question, then, becomes obvious. Should Americans be able to use the Internet in the most important polls of all? Some advocates of Internet voting argue that Americans are well suited to casting their ballots online in political elections. They are eager to make use of new technology, and they have relatively broad access to the Internet. Voting would become easier for people stuck at home, at the office, or on the road. Internet voting might encourage greater political participation among young adults, a group that stays away from the polling place in droves. It would hold special appeal for military personnel overseas, whose ability to vote is a growing concern. There are serious concerns, however, regarding computer security and voter fraud, unequal Internet access across socioeconomic lines (the "digital divide"), and the civic consequences of moving elections away from schools and other polling places and into private homes and offices. After all, showing up to vote is the most public civic activity many Americans engage in, and it is often their only overt participation in the democratic process. In Point, Click, and Vote, voting experts Michael Alvarez and Thad Hall make a strong case for greater experimentation with Internet voting. In their words, "There is no way to know whether any argument regarding Internet voting is accurate unless real Internet voting systems are tested, and they should be tested in small-scale, scientific trials so that their successes and failures can be evaluated." In other words, you never know until you try, and it's time to try harder. The authors offer a realistic plan for putting pilot remote Internet voting programs into effect n

The upcoming Presidential election will be pivotal in determining our country's future for years to come. The race is intensifying, but our antiquated voting system may not be able to accurately count all the votes. Millions of military and other overseas voters will be dependent on the postal system to vote, the same as more than 100 years ago. Millions of votes in past elections went uncounted. The United States ranks #31 out of the leading 34 developed countries in voter participation. One of the reasons for the low turnout is our out of date system for registration and voting. Physically going to a polling place is an old fashioned idea to millennials. Election Attitude - How Internet Voting Leads to a Stronger Democracy, is an eye-opening and thought-provoking book which explores how we register and vote in America. Voting is mostly done with out of date machines running out of date software. After the voting debacle of 2000, thousands of voting jurisdictions across America replaced their voting machines with the latest technology available. Now that equipment is nearly 15 years old. Many Americans are asking why we can't vote on the Internet. To his surprise, Dr. John R. Patrick discovered anti-Internet voting activists have convinced political leaders and election officials the Internet is not good enough for voting. Election Attitude debunks this concern with an in depth but easy to read discussion about Internet security, authentication, privacy, verifiability, and other challenges to online voting. Election Attitude paints a positive vision for how solutions can be developed to bring voting into the modern era. As he has shown in his prior books, Net Attitude and Health Attitude, complex problems can be addressed if the right attitude is applied. After serving on the board of a community hospital, Dr. Patrick was shocked to learn how slowly hospitals were adopting new information technology. He said, "I was appalled at how archaic hospital processes were-with paper, post-its, and clip boards everywhere. In early 2016, Patrick became interested in the American system for registration and voting. "In my research for Election Attitude, I found the situation in American voting even more archaic than in healthcare. I immediately thought there must be a way Internet technology can make voting more convenient, increase voter participation, and produce a stronger democracy." In his research, Patrick found there were many obstacles to Internet voting. Politicians prefer the status quo. "When more votes could mean fewer incumbents being re-elected," there is no political will to embrace Internet voting. Despite the incredible advances in Internet technology which have made it possible to trust the Internet with our money and our personal healthcare information, the elite group of anti-Internet voting activists actively lobby against Internet voting. Election Attitude challenges their rationale and urges state by state and county by county pilots of Internet voting using advanced technology such as blockchain and the mobile Internet with smartphones. Election Attitude includes a vision focused on consumers who use the Internet for most aspects of their lives - except to vote. The vision intersects with the expectations of millennials and Generation Z Americans. Our country has one of the lowest rates of voter participation in the world. Our democracy is not working as well as it could. Patrick says, "Internet voting will make it much stronger."

This book offers an in-depth, comparative analysis of how interactive Web 2.0 online tools, including weblogs, social networking sites and file-sharing sites, are utilised by candidates and parties during three recent election campaigns in France, Belgium, the US and the UK.