Virtual Vote - Post No. 3

Most political veterans know that in a tight election campaign - like this one appears to be shaping up to be - perception is everything. With the debates last week, we saw leaders and politicians taking shots at each other, and there's also a very vigorous internet campaign taking place out there.

It seems the troops are being issued their orders to get out on the internet and try to influence the public in any way they can.

There were debates last week at the Charlottetown Chamber of Commerce, on private radio, on CBC Radio Friday morning, and there was a televised debate hosted by the Guardian at UPEI. After that debate, the Guardian put a poll up on its website. It asked, 'Who do you think won the leaders debate at UPEI,' and it lists the four party leaders. You could click on your choice of who you thought won.

Of course the thing about that poll is people can vote as many times as they want. Sounds like American Idol! But Islanders wouldn't do that would they?

Of course they would. It's a P.E.I. election, after all. Shortly after that poll went up, the call went out to loyal party supporters to get on the internet and start voting! In fact, I have a copy of an e-mail that was sent to a long list of Tory supporters asking them to get on that poll, vote early and vote often.

"I just voted about 60 to 70 times and seen the per cent change by two. If everyone can vote as many times as possible, we will see a huge jump for Binns," said the e-mail.

Of course, the Liberals also put out a call for their supporters to get voting on that poll, both by e-mail and on various Liberal Facebook sites. On Friday, the Liberal mouse clickers seemed quite a bit more organized, because Robert Ghiz was chosen as winner by 62 per cent of the votes while Pat Binns had only 32 per cent.

Of course the only thing this poll measures is the ability and/or desire of party organizers to get the party faithful on to the Guardian website.

Along the same lines, on the Elect Robert Ghiz Facebook page, his sister Joanne Ghiz provided a link to another online poll that asked this question: "Is Pat Binns doing a good job?"

Joanne Ghiz has asked all good Liberals to get busy on that internet poll by answering, "No, Pat Binns is not doing a good job."

Party organizers are also very busy on the comment sections of many sites out there - especially on sites where people can leave comments anonymously, like the Guardian, the Journal-Pioneer, and PEI Talk. Very few of the recent comments there are really about election issues. They seem, more and more, to be partisan potshots. Some of the comments seem to be the same person - agreeing with him or herself - several times over.

In fact, there was a bit of an internet scandal on the Guardian website last week. Someone accused an anonymous poster who was favourable to Pat Binns of being the same person, posting comments under five different names.

For some reason, the Guardian's web editor decided to reveal the internet address of those five anonymous posters. And indeed, all five came from the same computer. To make it even slightly more scandalous - the five comments were traced to a computer in the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, where all good party hacks go to die.

There are other indications on the internet that the race is getting tighter and, therefore, nastier.

In my first Virtual Vote column, I mentioned the PEI Talks political discussion page. Just after the election was called, the top item was a reader poll about who would win the election, with a large majority figuring the Tories would be returned.

Go to that site now and two of the most popular threads are, "Will Binns stay on as Opposition leader?" and "Why is Ghiz so disliked?" That topic was started on May 1 - it now goes on for five pages. For the first week or so, it was all about Robert Ghiz's perceived lack of leadership ability. There was a lot of Ghiz bashing.

But there's been a subtle, but dramatic, shift in that topic this week. For example, there was this post from a longtime member of that discussion board. This poster has been hard on Ghiz in the past, and he doesn't appear to have party affiliations.

"I was never a huge Robert Ghiz fan, but I think he's come a long way over the course of the election. He sounded like he was going to be running this province last night, and Binns sounded like he was on the defensive. I never thought the Liberals would actually win this election, but now I'm starting to think they might."

There are many long-term posters on that site who are noting the same, subtle change. What that means - if anything - for election day, remains to be seen.

It's not all nasty and vicious - and interesting - out there. If you grow tired of anonymous cheap shots, you can always have a look at the official pages of the candidates. I will admit I haven't read every single one of these, but enough to feel qualified to say that most - if not all - are very boring.

There is one candidate website, however, that offers a bit of insight into something many of us have always wondered about, "What it's like going door to door?" The answer to that all-important question, "How many times should a candidate expect to get bitten by a dog during the course of the election campaign?"

Cynthia Dunsford, running for the Liberals in Stratford/Kinlock, is a writer and comedian. On her website, she is keeping a slightly bitter tally of how many times she's been bitten by dogs. She points out that at this stage of the campaign both of her thumbs have been chewed by dogs, and those were alleged Liberal dogs.

You may be thinking, "How can I be a web slinger too? How can I explore the murky world of internet campaigning?"

Here's how. It's called an aggregator. An aggregator is a website that keeps track of blogs, news outlets, chat lines and the like, and updates every time any one of those things update. So you can just click on your blog aggregator to see what - if anything - has just been published at any given minute.

One popular PEI aggregator is called PEIBlogs.com. It's been around since 2004 and is connected to 700 Island blogs and websites. So I let PEIBlogs.com do the work for me, and still have time for my beauty sleep.