This year's US presidential election is increasingly being fought on the Internet, with more than half the nation logging on to the candidates' ferocious and competitive websites. Millions of campaign dollars have been raised via the Net, and in some states it will be possible to vote online. Ben Macintyre reports

The e-vote is coming

When historians come to write about this, the first US presidential election of the Internet age, they may start with the moment during the first Republican debate last month when Senator Orrin Hatch turned to the Texas Governor, George W. Bush, and fired off a stinging criticism never heard in the history of politics: "Yours," Hatch sneered, "is not user-friendly."

He was alluding to the official "Bush for President" website, and his remark was only one, highly symbolic, example of the way this election is being fought in, against and over cyberspace. With 56 per cent of American adults already logged on and the online population rocketing, Net culture is permeating every corner of the electoral process in ways that are admirable, deplorable, unpredictable and likely to change the shape of democracy. Candidates have already raised millions of dollars via the Net; rival campaign websites are competing with increasing ferocity and ingenuity; e-mail is transforming the way candidates canvass and creating a powerful new lobbying tool in the form of interactive political representation.

The Vice-President, Al Gore, embarrassed himself by claiming to have invented the Internet, but his political instinct was right on the button, for American presidential candidates have always been swift to adopt and adapt new technology for political purposes. In 1908 William Jennings Bryan astonished voters by using a gramophone as a campaign tool; in 1924 Calvin Coolidge was the first candidate to use the radio; television came into its own politically with the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Now it is the Net's turn, and every would-be President is scrambling to demonstrate his superior dexterity with a mouse and keyboard.

"Ignore the Internet at your peril, and the peril of your issues," says Pam Fielding of e-Advocates, a new Internet political consultancy.

You can attack political enemies on the Web, raise money, trumpet your virtues, display your baby photos, harass journalists, round up the faithful and home in on specific groups with an accuracy no other form of advertising can equal. Voters can sidestep the whole process of making up their own mind by tapping their views into the website selectsmart; this tells them which candidate most nearly reflects and represents their opinions. A range of sites is aimed at galvanising interest among specific segments of the population: Latinvoter.com, Shesgotvote.com and so on. Last November, in a taste of future virtual political assemblies, President Clinton offered an electronic version of Roosevelt's fireside chats, playing host to 30,000 people in the first presidential town hall meeting in cyberspace.

But perhaps most significantly, this is the first election in which voters, as yet only a handful, will be able to vote online. The Democratic primary contest in Arizona on March 11 will be the "first legally binding public election over the Internet". E-voters will be able to sign in with their party to obtain a personalised ID code, a "digital certificate" that can be used to cast a ballot online, from a home computer or at terminals in polling places. (In Texas, citizens can already vote online - as long as they are astronauts in outer space.)

And a California task force is expected to recommend phasing in e-voting over several years, though advocates may force a state referendum on the issue in November; Florida, Iowa and Washington are moving the same way, and plans are in place to enable some 350 US soldiers stationed abroad to cast their votes online. Some 80 per cent of Internet users want to be able to vote online.

"By 2004 it will be a permanent part of the mix," says Phil Noble, the president of Politics Online, an Internet consultancy. The e-vote is coming, sooner rather than later, and a big debate is under way over its potential effects. Some say online voting will reverse the decline in voter turnout and bring young, technologically adept voters into the process. "It has the potential to broaden our democracy for more Americans to participate," says Jesse Jackson Jr, a Democratic congressman and son of the civil rights leader who has introduced a bill calling for a federal study of online voting.

But others fear that if the traditional polling station gives way to a computer ballot, this will marginalise even more the very people already most alienated from the political process - the poor and ill-educated, who are least likely to own or understand a computer - further turning American politics into a preserve of the more affluent and technically advanced. Some analysts predict a "digital divide" that could eventually exclude the Internet-ignorant from much of politics. "This question will become as important over the next 20 or 30 years as the literacy question. We'll have a new literacy problem: digital illiteracy," says Robert Arena, the Republican political consultant who began working on political Internet strategies for Bob Dole's 1996 campaign.

Online ballots are also an irresistible invitation to political fraud and computer sabotage. "An Internet election will be a natural target for hackers," says Hans von Spakovsky, of the Voting Integrity Project.

If online voting may turn out to be both boon and a curse, the same has already become apparent of Internet electioneering. In one sense the Net could reduce the power of money in elections by somewhat levelling the playing field between wealthy and impoverished candidates, giving those with limited resources access to a political tool that is cheap, adaptable and effective. Surveys show that campaigns can grab voter attention for an average of 45 seconds in a telephone call, compared with eight minutes on a website.

In his book Vote.com Dick Morris, Clinton's former adviser, has proclaimed the advent of Jeffersonian direct democracy through "the interactivity of the Internet". Envisioning the Web as a vast, extremely powerful mass lobbying machine, capable of unleashing a torrent of e-mails to the relevant actors on specific issues, Morris declares: "By permitting us to speak back to political figures, the Net will increase, exponentially, our capacity to participate at all levels of government." But the "we" taking part in Morris's e-mail democracy will be only those with the computers and knowhow, perhaps again narrowing political participation to a politically active "tecchie" elite, albeit a vast one.

The Net is an ideal vehicle for grassroots, chain-reaction political campaigns. But it is also a useful tool for slinging mud, a fertile, disorganised seedbed for half-truths, scandal and damaging innuendo.

There was a telling moment at the start of this election when it emerged that the campaign of George W. Bush had been secretly buying up vacant websites with names such as bushsucks.com and other unflattering titles to prevent the candidate's enemies from using them as launch pads for negative Internet flak. Click on one of these sites, and you are automatically rerouted to the official Bush website. The attempt to head off those assaults was bound to fail, and Bush became so enraged with one such site, gwbush.com/, which insists on showing digitally enhanced pictures of the candidate with a smear of white powder under his nose, that he threatened legal action against the author of the site, so ensuring a fresh tide of Web surfers.

Attack sites are spreading, and range from the parodic and informative to the libellous and nasty. Hillaryno.com, aimed at undermining Mrs Clinton's Senate campaign, has the spittle-flecked tone of her likely opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, whereas the site Goretopia achieves a more telling effect by satirising the Vice-President's ponderous wordiness, "envisioning a post-present future for the generation that will follow the children of our parents' generation . . ."

The candidates have responded in various ways to the Internet challenge, but none has been able to ignore it. The Pew Research Centre says 11 million people used the Net to obtain political information at the last election; that figure may be nearer 80 million this time.

"The Internet can't supplant what you'd otherwise do in a campaign, but you can't have a campaign without it," says Gordon McDonald, an adviser on Dan Quayle's presidential attempt. Before it died, the Quayle campaign was one of the most effective at deploying the new technology.

In online fundraising, which required an alteration of the electoral rules to permit credit card donations, the two insurgent candidates, the Democrat Bill Bradley and the Republican John McCain, are well ahead of the pack. So far McCain has pulled in $500 million in Net contributions, five times the amount collected by Bush, partly thanks to a device that ensures that a little box keeps popping up on the screen if you leave the site unattended for any time, like a polite but insistent begging bowl.

Jesse Ventura, the former wrestler who is now Governor of Minnesota, blazed the trail in using the Web to drum up younger voters, and since his election to Governor, Net electioneering has spiralled off in every direction. Several presidential candidates have used it as a way of showing personal integrity: McCain, who has called the Internet "the greatest thing that's happened to the world", offers photographs of himself in uniform after his release from a Vietnamese prison camp; Bush has prominently posted a list of all donors and donations to his campaign as an illustration of financial muscle, openness and the broad base of his support; Bradley has included his own financial disclosure statement, as well as cookie recipes and instructions on holding a "Bradley for President" dinner party; Orrin Hatch, a Mormon bishop, gives Bible readings and sings hymns.

The Bush site is multilingual, addresses you by your first name if you choose to personalise your relationship with it, and will calculate your taxes under the candidate's new tax plan if you so desire. That of Gore offers a free, downloadable bumper sticker and gauzy photographs of Gore family life, with shots of the patriarch seated at his computer. Last month Gore dropped into a Washington cybercafé to fire off an e-mail to Bradley, challenging him on healthcare.

Steve Forbes, as one might expect of a millionaire publisher, is especially proud of his technological grip. Indeed, his candidacy was announced electronically before it was declared to the rest of the world. "You and I are entering the information age," Forbes announced. "And Washington politicians are stuck in the Stone Age."

But some of the sites, inadvertently, may say more about the contenders than they intend. Like the candidate himself, the Forbes site is rich but overelaborate: "Do we really need to know that they had to send out for more fried chicken at a rally in Iowa?" wondered PR Week in its survey of websites. Donald Trump's page is less a political statement than a paean of self-praise: "[He] is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting the standards of excellence. He is the archetypal businessman, a deal-maker without peer . . ." The actor Warren Beatty's pseudo-presidential campaign site, deliciously, was never anything but a logo, and at the bottom of the site set up by the conservative activist Gary Bauer is a sad little box inviting everyone - anyone - to work as an intern on his ailing campaign.

The sites monitor one another avidly. Indeed, the McCain campaign got good mileage out of the discovery that the largest single source of visitors to its pages were Bush campaign staff. Was this evidence of fear on the part of Bushites, or of them wavering in their loyalty? Either way, the immediate response was to add another page inviting Bush supporters to swap horses and make a contribution.

The latest Net battleground is political advertising. By integrating nationwide voter lists with demographic information that computer users have supplied voluntarily to Internet companies, the candidates can achieve a level of precision targeting of specific voters denied to the more costly TV advertising. In the run-up to next week's Iowa caucus, for example, Gore has been sending e-mails to working women in the state, one of the demographic groups where his backing is weakest, emphasising such issues as more flexible hours for working mothers.

Quite apart from the way the Net is being used, and even abused, the serious questions it raises, from pornography and privacy issues to sales taxes on e-commerce, have become central to the presidential campaign agenda, not least because of the quantity of money being raised in donations from people who have profited vastly from the Internet boom. "This is an extraordinary transformation," Senator Ron Wyden told The New York Times recently, predicting the end of the smoke-filled room and the advent of the "duelling e-mail" as the defining characteristic of modern electioneering.

"To reach the swing, independent voters who will decide the 2000 elections, you have to talk about those issues." The full political potential of the Net will not be realised in this election, but Campaign 2000 will set the electronic stage for what will follow, as high-speed connections move the system into an even higher gear.

No candidate will ever again be able to proclaim themselves, as Clinton once could, a computer illiterate, for the Net has become the motor for a new form of democracy. It is a powerful weapon and a dangerous liability, and there is a vast, swelling constituency of voters to be wooed and won. The Internet, in short, is the 51st state.

Britain is 'three years behind'

GRASSROOTS campaigning in cyberspace is rare and online fundraising almost unheard of within British politics, according to academic experts.

Dr Stephen Ward, a politics lecturer at the University of Salford, says we are about three years behind the US. "Most of the parties here don't have a sophisticated strategy for the Internet," adds Dr Ward, who conducts an annual study on politicians and the Internet with his fellow lecturer Rachel Gibson. "At the moment, they have websites which are full of propaganda and soundbites but are not regularly updated. They are also fairly dull, and in terms of layout not very innovative."

Smaller parties, such as Sinn Fein, are the exception. The Internet allows them to publish information that conventional media, such as television and radio, often overlook or ignore.

"Sinn Fein are quite sophisticated, providing information and seeking donations online, mainly because they want to keep their Irish-American supporters in the US informed," says Dr Ward.

London mayoral candidates, particularly Ken Livingstone, are also aggressively using the Net, with sites publishing policies and attacking opponents.

Dr Ward says there are two reasons why Britain lags behind the US. First is the sheer number of Internet users. About 50 per cent of US citizens use the Internet regularly compared with about 30 per cent of Britons. Secondly, British general election campaigns, and therefore the information released to voters, are controlled by party headquarters. In the US, candidates run their own agendas and most politicians bombard the Internet with websites, debates and forums.

However, Stephen Coleman, the director of electronic media at the Hansard Society, says British politicians are beginning to use the Internet to their advantage. One in six MPs has his or her own website.

TRUDY HARRIS