BY JAMES ROSEN: Washington Bureau, The News & Observer

This is reprinted with permission from The News & Observer of Raleigh.

Ever since Election Day, skeptical Internet detectives have been slicing and dicing the Nov. 2 presidential vote from swing states across the country.

Spurred by online protests, New Hampshire recently completed a recount in parts or all of eight towns, and Ohio is poised to start a statewide recount. Dozens of Florida counties face Freedom of Information requests for all computer records tied to the election.

In Washington, Democratic lawmakers have asked a congressional agency to investigate nationwide polling problems and have written to Ohio’s top elections official, demanding answers to myriad voting questions in that key battleground state.

The specific circumstances of Election Day fallout vary from state to state, but they share a common strand: Their impact has been magnified or even initiated by the power of the Internet.

Nearly two months after Sen. John Kerry conceded defeat and urged national unity, the Internet is still trafficking in accusations and theories about alleged voting irregularities, rigged equipment, machines that counted backward, machines that stopped counting and all manner of possible mishap from incompetence to outright fraud.

Beyond the allegations and rhetorical fire, the Web sleuths are downloading election data, cracking software code from voting machines and poring over spreadsheets filled with figures on registration, turnout and party affiliation. Some of their findings have played a concrete role in post-election probes.

To cite one example, Ida Briggs, a software designer and database manager in Michigan, went online and found what she thought was a suspicious pattern of inflated votes for President Bush in southern New Hampshire. In short order, Briggs forwarded her findings to third-party candidate Ralph Nader, who made them the basis of his demand for a partial recount in the Granite State. That recount, completed Nov. 30, found no evidence of significant problems.

“What you're talking about here is the democratization of information,” said Daniel W. Drezner, a University of Chicago political science professor who has written extensively about the Internet. “It used to be that if you wanted to study what was going on in politics or elections, you needed to be a professor or a journalist. Now, the Internet basically permits anyone who is reasonably intelligent and knows how to use a search engine to get this information.”

A Level Playing Field

Most of the digital detectives probing the 2004 election outcome are self-avowed Democrats or Kerry supporters, and many have advanced degrees and experience in statistics, mathematics or computer science.

Robin Baneth, head of information technology at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh, has written several essays voicing his suspicions about the election; they are posted on a number of Web sites.

Last month, in a “Wheel of Voter Challenge 2004,” Baneth offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove that electronic voting machines are more reliable than paper-based systems. He later upped the ante to $2,000, challenging anyone to prove that his nine-step method of hacking into county vote tabulators — which he obligingly posted on the Internet — doesn’t work. So far, he has had no takers.

Calling himself a “registered compassionate liberal Democrat,” Baneth acknowledged that he contributed $100 to the Kerry-Edwards campaign. But he insisted that he is driven by a nonpartisan desire to ensure fair, accurate vote tallies by requiring election officials to create a paper trail for electronic machines.

“I personally have one goal, which is printers in the precincts,” Baneth said. “I'm not trying to moan and whine and have sour grapes. Everybody wants an even playing field in a democracy. We’re using the Internet to meet this goal.”

He said he has no direct proof of election fraud but suspects it occurred, because the machines are so vulnerable to tampering and malfunctions.

In Carteret County, N.C., in fact, the election for state agriculture commissioner is still up in the air because an overloaded tabulator lost 4,438 votes. The day after the election, the word was out online, and Carteret election officials were blitzed with e-mail from upset voters.

Multiple Roots

The lingering electronic buzz about the presidential election has several roots: the 2000 Florida recount, the five-week drama that introduced millions of Americans to the arcane methods of vote-counting and led many to see its imperfections for the first time; the replacement of punch-card systems with electronic voting machines, which substituted the possibility of human error with the specter of nefarious computer error; and this year's Election Day exit polls, which erroneously predicted that Kerry would win.

Another root is the accepted practice of many states’ top election officials actively participating in the campaigns of their party's presidential nominee. Still another breeding ground of suspicion is Diebold Inc., an Ohio company that is one of the country's largest manufacturers of electronic voting equipment.

Diebold Chairman and CEO Walden O’Dell faced a storm of controversy last year after a fund-raising letter he had written for Bush was disclosed. Stories about the flap still circulate widely online.

But more than anything, the continuing election debate displays the Internet’s ever-expanding reach, its increasing ability to influence American politics and its growing status as a news alternative to broadcast and print media outlets.

B.J. Fogg, director of the Web Credibility Project at Stanford University, said his researchers’ studies show that almost half of Internet users decide whether to believe a Web site’s information based on the design or appearance of the site.

“The Internet is all about persuasion, not information,” Fogg said. “People like to think of it as a huge electronic encyclopedia with all this fair and unbiased information, but virtually everything on the Web is biased. People don’t create Web sites just for fun or to inform you. They create Web sites to make money or change the way you think and act.”

Polarizing Force?

The Internet is a major contributor to the country’s increased political polarization, Fogg thinks, because it enables people to find easily information that supports their opinions.

“Because you can find evidence to support whatever you want to believe, you’re going to become more and more entrenched in your views and more resistant to other views,” he said. “It becomes more difficult to find common ground. It’s sort of like the blind man and the elephant — everyone is completely convinced that their part of the elephant is the only part that exists.”

Drezner, the University of Chicago expert, has a less pessimistic view. He sees the Internet as a rapidly maturing medium that is developing self-policing mechanisms of sorting out truth from fiction.

From outlandish notions of what really happened Sept. 11, 2001, to far-fetched claims about Bush’s true intent in Iraq, the Internet has helped to produce an explosion of conspiracy theories and urban legends.

But, as Drezner noted, it also helps knock them down in short order by inviting skeptical responses — a process he said has clearly buffered the more incendiary claims about voting irregularities.

Evaluating Claims

“The Internet has made transparent what used to be conversations you would never know about,” he said. “If the Internet didn’t exist, you’d end up with fewer urban legends, but ones that don’t go away.”

When it comes to the election just past, Web gumshoes are grappling with this very problem of separating legend from legitimate concerns and questions.

David Allen, a former computer-systems engineer who runs a small publishing company in High Point, launched his www.blackboxvoting.org Web site as a digital clearinghouse for dispassionate analysis of election controversies.

The increase in computerized voting — from about 20 percent of all balloting in 2000 to roughly one-third this year — gives rise to suspicion, Allen said, because the new machines use hidden methods of recording votes, often with no paper audit or record.

“The problem with these voting machines is that they are made by private corporations,” he said. “They use [software] code that is their proprietary secret. So, we are asking American voters to trust not just the company, but the individual programmers and technicians on top of the election officials. It’s added an entire new layer of people you have to trust.”

The Internet is both a blessing and a curse, Allen said, because it allows people with expertise to offer well-grounded perspectives alongside the wilder ideas of those with little or no knowledge.

“On the Internet among technicians, it’s called the signal-to-noise ratio,” he said. “What that means is there’s so much noise in the background, it’s hard to make out the actual signal. There are valid claims about the election, but with so many charges and countercharges, the actual truth is getting lost in the noise.”

For good and for bad, the Internet’s effect on American politics is almost certain to grow.

Henry Farrell, a George Washington University political science professor, said a handful of Web commentators — or “bloggers” in online parlance — have emerged as influential opinion brokers, with several hundred thousand daily readers, more than that of all but the country’s 50 or so largest newspapers.

“Blogs are becoming part of the everyday bread-and-butter of the American political system,” Farrell said. “Just as the political hacks try to spin newspaper and TV reporters, they also try to spin bloggers. Politicians are beginning to wake up to the fact that blogs are important.”

Going Mainstream

A growing number of mainstream reporters are reading the top political bloggers, he said, and political operatives are communicating with them directly.

During the campaign, bloggers were the first to question the validity of the documents that CBS News had used to challenge Bush's service in the Air National Guard. Mainstream reporters followed their lead, and the network had to issue an embarrassing apology.

Fogg, the Stanford expert on Web credibility, said Internet users who want to find the gold nuggets of reliable information must be willing to work hard, invest a lot of time and challenge their own assumptions.

“Seek information that goes against your hunches,” he said. “Look for the opposite side of the story. That takes both effort and courage because most of us are lazy, and we are uncomfortable changing our opinions.”

How to Gauge

Web Sites

TAKE AN ONLINE TUTORIAL from UNC Libraries. The Web site has step-by-step primers on credibility, bias, accuracy, currency and relevance of online information. www.lib.unc.edu/ instruct/evaluateweb/ evaluating/index.html

CHECK OUT the Stanford Credibility Project, which studies what causes people to believe -- or not to believe -- what they find online. It offers Web designers 10 guidelines to increase the credibility of their Web sites. http://credibility. stanford.edu/