October 24, 2004, 12.07pm • 16 comments » • 1,327 Views

Angry voters scupper Operation Clark County

Guardian Unlimited has been forced to halt Operation Clark County, its programme enlisting UK web users to write to electors in the key Ohio district persuading them to vote for their preferred candidate, after what it says was a spam attack from angry right-wing opponents.

The newspaper launched the effort in mid-October as a means for global citizens to influence the November “global election” for the position of leader of the free world. It paid $25 for the local electoral register, passing on names and addresses of voters to participants around the world. For a letter I found personally interesting, check out this eloquent one from a gentleman down the road in Newport.

Despite signing up 14,000 activists by its closure this weekend, the programme immediately met resistance from critics angered at what they saw to be foreign meddling in a domestic election.

CNN said the operation had “sparked outraged”. The majority of Ohioans’ responses, indeed, told the paper, and Britons, to keep their noses out of US business. A thread I participated in on Murmurs.com threw up just a few of the feelings from Americans; for example:-

It’s true that the election in America affects other countries far more than the elections in other countries affect America, but as people have said, this is ridiculously counterproductive … Their standards must have really lapsed for a moment.

Europeans hate us because they don’t understand what “makes us tick”. Europeans hate us because we aren’t like them. I really don’t care what the whole lot of you thinks.

Telegraph.co.uk is loving all of this, running a report apparently filed from Youngstown, OH, which has the paper’s bosses “simultaneously den(ying) and conced(ing) that an early halt had been called to the project”, saying the scheme backfired from the start” and calling it a “surrender’. All very militaristic. The paper quotes the British spokesman for Democrats Abroad as saying the project “will certainly garner more votes for George Bush” and a senior Democrat in Clark County is saying shutting it down was the best thing to do.

From the horse’s mouth, The Guardian’s Ian Katz of G2 writes:-

It’s not as if we didn’t consider the possibility that our project might have precisely the opposite effect to that intended .. It’s just that we didn’t believe it. It seemed unlikely that our campaign would ever reach a scale that would have any real impact on the election, one way or another.

But that scale meant the Guardian was bit on the bum in a fashion typical of the mass-mobilised protests of today’s internet media. Guardian readers’ editor, Ian Mayes, explained, in a Saturday comment piece, that 3,000 emails of protest had poured into individual Guardian journalists, some of a total 5,000 messages of complaint. He said the intention was to “open up debate”.

It was clear that a “spamming” campaign was involved … [it] illustrated the intimidatory tactics of the angry right. The response of Democrats, fearing that their cause would be harmed, showed that the intimidation worked. The intention was to smother free speech.

So what was Operation Clark County all about? To me, it seemed like an attempt to use the globalising scale of the internet to produce a real-world effect that would practically shape the US election. Whether it is a newspaper’s job to be influencing elections, I’m not at all convinced.

Fair play, I do think the operation was conceived as a tool of the internet age, an agnostic platform for social action rather than a knowing, biased political campaign - the website never advocated readers force Kerry on Ohioans (though the newspaper did).

On the surface, it seemed like just the right idea for the right medium at the right time, joining all the other political action tools being developed by the likes of MySociety and TheyWorkForYou and the several others that have cropped up, pre-election, in the US. Old media doing something engaging with new media; three cheers.

However, we could all have predicted which candidate Guardian readers - myself amongst them - would have been extolling. Then, we could have predicted the outcome. Besides, those other sites truly are agnostic as they deal in data, not opinion.

GuardianUnlimited has been known to get half of its traffic from the US - a stat put down to a perceived lack of balanced opinion in US media. But Ian Mayes, in a typical display of straight-down-the-line openness, says:-

… my own view is that the paper in carrying out the exercise through the intrusive use of the voters’ list, has prejudiced some of the goodwill it has built up in America and unnecessarily excited its enemies

Mr Mayes added that, in an internal poll he conducted on Farringdon Road, a majority Guardian journalists was against the newspaper’s programme.

What with the CBS News scandal and the rest of it, this election really has been fought online in the US, with weblogs, sharing of articles etc. etc. - lots of interesting exchanges of opinion. But Mayes quotes one of his journalists as saying:-

“It seems a shame that, in this interactive age, with email and weblogs all around, we rejected any attempt to have a real conversation with US voters.”

It’s important that we do let America know how much what it does affects the rest of us around the world. But I will be very impressed if the electors in Clark County take that on board when going to the ballot box. Operational Clark County was either ambitious or naive, and I’m only half-way there between deciding whether this was a public service that sadly failed or a project pushing the journalism envelope too far (but I certainly know which half). It created an engagement of sorts between US and global citizens, but that engagement took an offensive position and wasn’t particularly fruitful.

In the meantime, a far less charged way for global citizens to express an opinion is to vote in Global Vote 2004. It won’t lead to any Americans changing their mind on their voting intention, but it will produce a snapshot of what the (online) world thinks they should do.

ps. It’s worth pointing out the UK’s Association of Online Publishers on Friday honoured Guardian Unlimited for its “trailblazing” contribution to online publishing.

Update (Nov 4): In his blog, Kevin Anderson, the BBC’s man in Washington, suggests Operation Clark County may have helped the Republican cause en route to election victory.