HERE in the Philippines, at least, people advocating for much needed electoral reforms have also raided the Internet. Fuelled in large measure by the disenchantment over unbridled corruption as attested to during the impeachment trial of Estrada, the strong anti-trapo (traditional politician) sentiment found its way to sites engaged in online voter education. The intrepid lot sought, as Halalan2001.com's creators declared, to transform passive citizens into an active, democratic voice in determining their collective future through periodic elections.

Private citizen-led, these election dotcoms—eBantay.com, Vote.ph, Whotovote.com, e-Leksiyon.com, Halalan2001, pinoyelections.net, among others—offered information relevant to the May elections like applicable laws, Commission on Elections (Comelec) rules, election calendar, data on previous elections, articles on voter education and empowerment, surveys and news. Foremost of these sites were Vote.ph developed by IT specialist Washington Alto, Whotovote.com and eBantay.com of the Filipinos for Reform and Empowerment through Education, Entrepreneurship and Electronic Media (FREE3), whose extensive databases covered both national- and local-level candidates for the May polls, as well as lists of accredited political parties, sectoral organizations and coalitions running under the party-list system.

The wealth of data, unfiltered so that voters can ultimately decide what issues and information are important, was courtesy not only of the Comelec but also of the candidates and parties themselves. The election portals provided them free webspace for their profiles and platforms as a way of leveling the uneven playing field, especially given a money-driven, personality-oriented political culture.

But not all sites remained neutral about their position on some candidates. eLagda.com, for one, launched an active "Say No to 'No' Senators" campaign against reelectionist senators—Juan Ponce Enrile, Gringo Honasan, Miriam Defensor-Santiago—who had voted not to open the second envelope during President Joseph 'Erap' Estrada's impeachment trial. The "negative" campaign also targeted known Erap lackeys running under the Puwersa ng Masa (PnM) banner, among them Edgardo Angara, Ricardo Puno, Panfilo Lacson, Orlando Mercado, Noli de Castro and Erap's wife, Loi Ejercito Estrada.

Rededicated to the cause of good governance and the defense of the gains of People Power II that booted Estrada out of office, eLagda.com was responsible for downloadable campaign materials, including comic strips depicting the "follies" of Enrile, Santiago and the PnM coalition, that circulated initially within online mailing lists and eventually went the rounds of offices, churches and communities. Its eMandirigmas (cyberwarriors) who waged email barrages during the impeachment trial were again called to active duty to appeal for a non-vote for Enrile and company.

SUCH NEGATIVE campaigns, however, assumed a more sinister tack with the emergence of anonymous websites that raked mud against certain candidates in gossip journalism fashion a la Matt Drudge. Although the accusations they made could not be dismissed outright as baseless, the fact that these could not be attributed to any single author only cast doubts on their credibility.

At least three separate sites, for instance, carried the same text of a damning report on the alleged abuses and illegal activities of the defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) then headed by PnM bet Lacson. Another site contained video clips of a former civilian agent's accounts of his murderous escapades with the PAOCTF. The operative, now dead, narrated tales of liquidation jobs upon the instigation of Lacson, some of which the agent even confessed to have been part of.

Even much earlier, senatorial race frontrunner Noli de Castro had likewise been the subject of a website's "white paper" claiming knowledge of the corrupt practices of the former ABS-CBN news anchor and show host. The contents of that report also found their way into email-based groups long before the campaign period began.

Fortunately, the online efforts of legitimate media organizations to bring information about election issues proved far less controversial. One of these was the i-site.ph, a collaboration between the PCIJ and iadobo.com. Launched at the start of the campaign period, i-site.ph is a database-driven information site on Philippine politics and government, and whose cyberlife is planned to last way beyond the May elections. Its first and current main fare are the results of the PCIJ's 18-month research on the 11th House of Representatives showing each of its 220 members' personal and political profiles, business interests, relatives in government, assets and liabilities, net worth, voting records, legislative performance, campaign expenses and contributions.

Other collaborative media endeavors were 'Eleksyon 2001,' the merged election coverage of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and broadcast network GMA-7's posted on www.inq7.net, and 'Halalan 2001' of rival network ABS-CBN, in tandem with the Philippine Star, hosted on its portal PinoyCentral.com.

The two consortia also conducted their respective independent quick counts of early election results in the meantime that the Comelec-accredited count of the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) had not started. AMA Computer College and its network of computer learning centers supervised the "Eleksyon 2001" quick count while STI, another computer school, took charge of that of "Halalan 2001." But the Halalan count had an added feature of wireless access to its partial, unofficial election tally, as well as those of Namfrel and Comelec, via cellular phones courtesy of Globe Telecom's short message service (SMS), or texting. Using assigned keywords, like namcount mayor [city/municipality], a cell phone user just had to send the text message to 2333 to get an instant listing of the top three candidates for mayor in the preferred city/municipality according to the Namfrel count.

Then there was FREE3, the IT-based political activist group, which also offered a text-based election update service at its site, eBantay.com, for subscribers of Globe and Smart Communications, two of the country's dominant cell phone service providers. The service carried latest election tallies, news and announcements from Comelec and Namfrel, accessible by sending text messages containing the keywords for preferred information (e.g. ebantay news, ebantay comelec, ebantay namfrel) to 288 and 2333 for Smart and Globe subscribers, respectively.