Red Herring, October 25, 2004

Can billions of political spam emails sway the election?

Forget debt refinancing, free laptops, and cheap Canadian drugs. The spam of the hour wants your vote, not your money.

In the first three weeks of October, political spam skyrocketed 300 percent from September levels, according to MailFrontier, a spam solution provider in Palo Alto, California. The company expects political spam to exceed 1.25 billion emails by the time Election Day rolls around.

In a race that is becoming a virtual dead heat, the parties and their affiliates are bombarding email addresses across the country with exhortations to vote for their candidate. But experts wonder what impact the email barrage could have outside of the annoyance factor.

“Email is just one of the many ways that the parties are trying to reach out to voters,” said Sonia Arrison, director of Technology Studies at the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a public policy think tank headquartered in San Francisco. “But it is the least-trusted method.”

But a survey by MailFrontier showed that political emails could impact the presidential election – especially since it’s such a tight race.

The respondents were shown two political spam samples, one an anti-Kerry email sent out by the Republican Party, and the other an anti-Bush email sent out by a Kerry supporter. Twenty-one percent of the 1,006 people surveyed said that such emails would affect their vote.

Eighty-nine percent of those surveyed were registered to vote and equally divided on party lines, and 25 percent were as yet undecided.

Ms. Arrison was not convinced by the results of the survey, however.

“These are negative emails, and for that reason it is conceivable that a few people might be swayed,” she said. “But I can’t see 21 percent of the country voting because of emails they received.”

Ms. Arrison pointed out that most of these emails were sent to people who had registered at the web sites of the respective parties, and therefore already had made up their minds.

“If they signed up at the sites, you know who they are going to vote for,” she said. “There could be a few people who signed up at both parties’ sites to help make up their mind, but these would be a very small number.”

Spokespersons for both the Democratic and Republican parties said that they were sending “several million” emails to their supporters and had no way of keeping track of the exact number sent, or who they were sent to.

A Democratic Party spokesperson said that emails are sent out to people for a variety of purposes, ranging anywhere from asking people to go out and vote to requesting contributions.

A Republican Party spokesperson said that the Republican National Committee tries to reach out to undecided voters through pop-up ads, and sends emails only to supporters.

Politics or no politics, the spam is definitely a nuisance for most recipients.

According to Ann Bonaparte, president and CEO of MailFrontier, the amount of political spam has increased partly due to a loophole in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which makes the sending of these non-commercial emails legitimate.

“Parties and advocacy groups are able to send millions of emails because they are not selling anything,” she said. “And that has led to the extraordinary increase in political spam emails in the last few months.”

Ms. Bonaparte said that it would cost about $500 to send a million emails.

Teney Takahashi, analyst at Palo Alto, California’s Radicati Group, a market research firm, said it costs users an average of $86 per year to deal with spam. Worldwide, $41.6 billion is spent fighting spam, and that does not include the aggravation involved.

PRI’s Ms. Arrison issued a warning to candidates involved in sending out political spam, saying a dangerous precedent already had been set.

“Joe Lieberman was accused of sending political spam, and he lost, as did Howard Dean. Another case was Bill Jones in the 2002 California gubernatorial race,” she said. “I think they need to realize that people are really fed up with spam.”