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Jan

21

City Council Member-Who-Blogs on Role of Internet in Brown v. Coakley


Ari Herzog is a newly seated city councillor in Newburyport, MA. I visited his council blog today to see if he’d commented on the Scott Brown and Martha Coakley race, won by Republican Scott Brown yesterday.  Brown’s ability to raise $12 million online has been cited all day as a new benchmark for what can be achieved (I just think it’s incredible that a state smaller in size and population than Ohio has one candidate raising and spending that much for a U.S. Senate seat!)

You can read Ari’s thoughts in their entirety, but in one snippet he uses his campaign experience to backup points about the importance of online tools that were made by Micah Sifry at a site called techPresident (it follows e-government and e-politics):

I can resonate with these thoughts, recalling my own use of internet tools during my city council campaign last fall. I’d announced my candidacy in early June on Facebook, and created Facebook, Twitter, and blogging outposts before soliciting signatures for my nomination papers. I then used both online networking and face-to-face networking to achieve a common goal on Election Day. Something worked; and based on people who continue to approach me that they enjoyed my online campaigning, the internet is a force that future candidates ought to consider.

The one thing I haven’t read about at all is how absentee voting figures into that calculation of tools used.  Frankly, I suspect that they become even more valuable.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 6:30 am January 21st, 2010 in activism, Campaigning, Elections, Politics, senate, Tech, Voting 

Comments

3 Responses to “City Council Member-Who-Blogs on Role of Internet in Brown v. Coakley”

  1. 1 Ari Herzog on January 21st, 2010 10:09 am

    Thanks for the feature, Jill! On your final question, I know of several people who absentee voted for me — one who lives in Mexico but with a residency in the city. He followed my updates on a sporadic email list. Thus, even if not the web, email is an important internet tool to consider.

  2. 2 Jill Miller Zimon on January 21st, 2010 12:18 pm

    That’s great! Was there much use of absentee for MA Senate? Here in Ohio that count is a good quarter to a 1/3, if not more, of the count for some races and people can start voting a full month before election day. It’s really affected campaigning.

  3. 3 Where You Can Find Ari Herzog Online | Ari Herzog on March 22nd, 2011 3:56 am

    [...] nervous breakdown and for Darren Rowse on why quitting Twitter is healthy; not to mention being praised by Jill Miller Zimon and criticized by Phil Butler, I thought I'd share some of the social [...]

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