The 2000 Romanian presidential elections gave a taste of the role that the Internet might play in an election - even when its use is not very widely developed. About 600,000 of the country's 23 million inhabitants are estimated to be Internet users, about half of them regularly. But this small number was reckoned to be significant, given low voter turnout combined with the fact that the mainly young, professional Internet users were among the most likely voters. So the Internet audience was seen as strategically significant.
Most online information on the election came not from the Web editions of the Romanian newspapers - these had very little Internet-specific information on their sites - but from Internet Service Providers, portals and dedicated sites launched by Romanian entrepreneurs. One such site was http://www.politics.ro, launched by Romania Online. This provided information on the seven main parties and their candidates - including a resume for each presidential candidate and his or her programme. The site also contained updated political news, opinion poll findings and online polls. On election day it provided data on voter turnout and exit poll results. (See Encuestas de Salida.)
Another source of online information was the political parties' own Web sites. Here, the election got particularly dirty, with hackers from the rival parties sabotaging their opponents' sites. At one stage, surfers who tried to log into the site of one candidate were redirected to a pornographic site and later to the FBI's "most wanted" list. Then they were redirected to a hostile political biography of the candidate. Similar dirty tricks are hardly unknown in the "real" world, but a virtual election campaign seems to lend itself to such tactics.123
