Elections affected by Cyberspace

"We viewed the Internet as an engine to gather people," explained David Plouffe. Plouffe was a manager of President Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign. The internet has changed the way Presidential campaigns are conducted. With the ability to reach millions of American citizens easily, the internet allows the candidates to respond to their opponents comments immediately and to connect with a specific group of voters. Along with the positives of the internet, there are also negatives that come with having the ability to gather people, and this is the amount of false information that a party could help persuade voters to vote for their candidate.

Obama’s opponent, John McCain had no idea what the internet could do to effect an election. "I'm an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get," McCain told Politico in 2008. McCain could not match Barack Obama in campaign fund raising. Part of this was due to the fact that McCain did not dip into the voters who use the internet as their primary means of researching candidates. Many voters will not watch all of the debates or pay attention to the commercials. These voters will conduct their own research on deciding which candidate best fulfills their needs.

Rumors in politics occurred long before cyberspace came to existence. Greek historian Thucydides observed that the spread of unverified information could be used to manipulate public opinion thousands of years ago. I believe Rumors are the biggest change with campaigns running on the Internet. Voters could be persuaded to vote based off a rumor they read online and could end up being false. Nobody could validate all of the information that is put out on the internet. However the internet does allow voters to access past bills that the candidate may have voted on and this information would be easily accessible without the internet. So the benefits might be worth the risk of coming across rumors instead of facts.

Voters are able to look at aspects of a candidate that most voters never cared to know due to the amount of information scattered on the internet. These could range from marital problems to all of the bills the candidate voted for. In some ways this could be a good thing due to the fact that Americans will likely know a lot more about the president than what they want you to know, and then again it could be a bad thing if the rumors were the reason why a candidate was not elected. In the end, society as a whole, is always evolving and who knows how dirty these elections will become when more of the campaigning is done in cyberspace.

Parpis, Ellie. "David Plouffe." Mediaweek 19.32 (2009): 16-35. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 10 June 2012.