By Patty Courtright

Election years usually send voters scrambling to find out more about the candidates, a task that often requires having to piece together information from various Web sites or rely on newspaper articles published just before votes are cast.

In the 1998 elections, however, voters could go online to a single site that linked them to election information in their own states. Called Web White & Blue, the online resource gathered available information about specific candidates' backgrounds, voting records, financial backers and the like. The information was organized so it could be found by zip code or state name.

"Most people didn't know how to tap into the wealth of information available on the 1998 elections, so our intent was to organize the information in a way that was easy to sort and search," says Cathy Clark, project director for the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation. The foundation, with Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, sponsored the online effort.

"Our primary focus was to help voters make better choices," she says. "The goal was to get people to the information they wanted in three clicks from our page."

Around election time, about half-a-million users visited the Web White & Blue site, Clark says, but that number doesn't include users who accessed the site through links from partnering commercial sites. America Online donated the site's Web-hosting services and Mindshare Internet Campaigns provided e-mail list-hosting for communication throughout the project's development.

In all, more than 1,300 other Web sites provided a link to Web White & Blue, Clark says. Through the site's informal evaluation, 80 percent to 90 percent of the users indicated it was the first time they had used the Web for political reasons, Clark says.

"It wasn't a statistically valid survey," she says, "but it showed the site seemed to get the exact audience we wanted. We weren't after the political techies."

Although the site is no longer live - that is, continually updating its information - it is accessible as an archive and still provides links to other live sites such as Project Vote Smart, democracy.net and other top news Web sites. The center is evaluating the next step for the site, Clark says.

Web White & Blue successfully demonstrated the Internet's power to put information into the public's hands, she says.

"It really was a public-private partnership and showed a tremendous willingness on the part of each commercial site to share an audience so the public could get needed information," she says.

Web White & Blue was developed as a result of a June 1998 meeting sponsored by the Shorenstein Center to focus on the role of the Internet in 1998 elections. Later that month, the Markle Foundation agreed to support the proposed Internet initiative through its "E-Mail for All" effort.

Patty Courtright can be reached at
pcourtright@mindspring.com