Internet Provides New Opportunities For Political Dirty Tricks
Dirty tricks used to mislead voters and keep them away from the polls, but new Web-centric attempts to disenfranchise voters are stoking fears amongst voters and activists. In the past, political trickery has relied on phone calls, fliers, and direct mailing, which are much easier to track and prosecute than the new wave of political scare tactics.
Traditional calls, like the push polls in 2000 that lifted Bush over McCain in South Carolina, have been replaced by robo-calls via VoIP that are harder to trace and not subject to the same restrictions land-line and cell phone based political phone campaigns are. Such tactics were turned on African-American voters in North Carolina during this primary season when calls were placed that led voters to believe they were not properly registered.
More familiar online techniques such as phishing, pharming (secretly redirecting traffic from one site to another), and good old fashioned typo-squatting have also made their way to the political arena. The primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton saw hackers redirecting visitors to Obama's social networking site MyBarackObama.com to Clinton's home page.
Experts expect to see spam e-mails giving out incorrect polling locations, misleading information about who can and cannot vote, and even money making and identity theft schemes centered around voter registration.
Of course all of the uses of the Internet in politics are not nefarious. Barack Obama has proven himself adept at utilizing social media and activists have been using it to organize large numbers of people since the 2004 Howard Dean campaign. [From: CNN]
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