When Arizona announced that it would allow online voting in its primaries this past spring, the news added what could be a scary dimension to the "digital divide." Plenty of people already worry that the Internet will exacerbate the divide between rich and poor by giving those with easy access to computers an advantage in schools and in jobs. Now, it seems, the affluent might start voting in greater numbers and increase their control of government. After all, only those with access to a computer can vote online.

Then be sure to get out and vote on Election Day.

We’re already partway there: Unlike when the Constitution was written, Congress and the executive branch now continuously take the public’s pulse and are compelled to pay at least some attention to the poll results. It used to be that once legislators and presidents were elected they could head off to remote state capitals and to Washington and make their decisions. Information about what decisions they made was slow to reach constituents and was erratic. If constituents didn’t like what their leaders did, they voted in new ones on Election Day. Today, officials receive instant feedback through polling. Increasingly, this means the public can act as the fourth branch of government, sitting at the table where major decisions are made—even more so than the press.

In states such as California, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, the power of legislators is being displaced by voters at the ballot box. Increasingly, state laws are being voted on by means of ballot initiatives and referenda. Oregon will have 25 ballot initiatives this year, and, for better or worse, the practice is sweeping eastward. As a result, today, more money is being spent lobbying the general public than lobbying legislators, one reason the price of politics has escalated so dramatically. You no longer have to lobby only committee chairmen and legislative committees; you have to lobby the whole population, which greatly increases the influence of money on politics.

The move toward a more direct democracy also reduces the power of political parties. High-profile candidates increasingly run independent of the traditional party apparatus. Political parties no longer function as the central disseminators of political information to the faithful. The parties used to serve as main sources of public entertainment, conducting picnics, torchlight parades, and political rallies. They also functioned as social welfare agencies, providing jobs, housing, and even food to the faithful in return for their votes. No longer. Today, parties exist for only one reason: to raise unrestricted political money for election campaigns.

New telecommunications technologies have also helped give rise to single-issue politics, contributing to gridlocked government. The convergence of personal computers, television, satellites, telephone, and radio has enabled those passionate about single issues such as abortion, immigration, home education, the environment, or prayer in the schools to operate across state, county, election district, and neighborhood lines. Geographical proximity is no longer a prerequisite for organizing political participation. No matter where they live, people with the same views can be mobilized to action. Traditional sectional issues are evaporating. Instead, technology is redefining the very nature of community.

DAVID BRADY: Richard Davis’s book, Web of Politics, argues that technology is going to make things worse by giving politicians more control than they had before—not less. But my view is that the truth lies somewhere between your position and Davis’s.

The Internet will benefit citizens primarily in areas where the cost of information is high. In national elections, such as for the presidency, the Internet will have no impact whatsoever, because there’s plenty of information available. But in low-level elections, where turnout is 3% to 5%—such as school-board elections, school-bond issues, local elections—the Internet can make information available at a very cheap price. Right now, it’s hard to get information on local issues. The media don’t report on them. I can listen to National Pubic Radio forever and never learn anything about a sheriff’s race in Anniston, Ala., or wherever. Because of the Internet, I’ll be able to sit at home and download information about local school-board issues, then actually vote online. Therefore, in low-level elections, technology will increase citizen participation.

Other than in local elections, though, technology won’t make much difference. It’s not going to change the balance of power by increasing participation by certain segments of the population, such as the young or others who traditionally don’t vote. They’re not going to suddenly leap to the fore and vote. The Internet will simply make more efficient what has already been in process. The media made a lot of the fact that Arizona Sen. John McCain collected a lot of money from individuals by using the Internet in his presidential bid. Well, Richard Viguerie did the same thing in the 1960s; he’s the guy who invented mass mailing for political campaigns. The trouble with mail is that for every dollar you collect, you have to spend 50 cents to get it. The Internet lets candidates raise money a little faster, and the transaction cost is now only one cent, but the idea of raising small amounts of money from lots of people is not new.

Another aspect of Internet democracy is that polling results depend almost entirely upon how you ask the question. If I ask, "Do you wish there would be less pollution?" everybody says, "Yes." If I ask, "Do you wish to pay x amount of dollars so that there will be less pollution?" I’ll get a different response. Thus, whoever frames the questions controls the results. Lots of groups will frame the questions their way and claim the "people" are with them. This is, of course, not in principle different from what we currently have with the polls.

In sum, there will be more information easily available. But I don’t see dramatic consequences for the way we govern.

GROSSMAN: I agree that some consequences of the new communications technologies are temporary, happening just because technologies such as the Internet are novel. Back in 1948 when television first started to cover presidential conventions, everybody said, "Wow, this will be great for democracy." Then, after a while, politics pretty much resumed its normal course and the public’s participation in civic affairs declined instead of increasing, thanks in good measure to television’s role as a medium of diversion and escapism. Eventually, television virtually abandoned convention coverage, because no major political decisions are made there any longer.

But we’ve already seen tremendous changes in our political system. We’ve begun to put the government on the Internet. And as local, state, and federal governments grow more sophisticated in utilizing the new technologies, citizens will have much more access to information and services and will be able to find out more of what’s going on. Technology will assist people in practical areas, such as registering automobiles, or changing their addresses for Social Security purposes, or registering to vote. Eventually, I have no doubt, we’ll have voting online.

At the same time, because of the huge increase in entertainment provided by new communications technology, government will have greater competition for the public’s attention. Politics will have to figure out how to become more interesting to people, which helps explain why, for better or worse, its entertainment quotient keeps going up.

BRADY: You’re making two claims. The first is that government agencies have become more customer-oriented. The second is that they are providing information more quickly. If you’re right, and government can be more efficient, that’s good.

But let’s go back to the idea of the newness of Web-based ballot initiatives. If you ask in California which ballot initiative has had the most effect, everybody says Proposition 13 [which drastically reduced property taxes in 1978]. Proposition 13 happened long before the Web, long before polling was omnipresent.

The second point about the ballot initiatives is what happens after they pass. Frequently, lawsuits are filed, and the courts ultimately decide whether the initiatives go into force. So, technology has shifted power. But it didn’t shift power to the legislature. And it certainly didn’t shift power to the people. It shifted power to lawyers and judicial officers of the court. The last four major propositions passed in California are all in courts. I don’t see any policy consequences whatsoever.

GROSSMAN: The policy consequences are enormous. In many states, as I’ve said, legislatures have largely been bypassed. And remember, in states where judges are elected, as in Colorado, if courts are going to overturn a ballot proposition they have to go directly against the majority that put them in office, a real danger to our system of checks and balances and separation of powers.

BRADY: But that’s no different than what happened in the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Popular opinion in a number of states had to be overturned by judges.

The question is: Is there a fundamental transformation of American politics? I don’t think so if I can show an example from 1798 where judges had to do the same thing.

GROSSMAN: But the Internet and the increasing convergence of communications technologies are changing the balance of power. They’re giving the public the opportunity to have much more active civic involvement, even if most fail to take advantage of it. Rich and powerful forces such as health-insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, the communications industry, the tobacco industry and others with an interest in particular pieces of legislation now spend many millions of dollars going directly to the people.

BRADY: It has always been the case that people who are more organized and more efficient tend to win over those who aren’t—which is why the rich do better than the poor. And that’s not just here, but in every democracy from Athens on.

But if the claim is that the Internet exacerbates what was always going on, then I think we’re in agreement.

GROSSMAN: We’re not talking just about the Internet. We’re talking about a whole nexus of telecommunications technologies that are changing our very approach to democracy.

The Constitution placed severe constraints on the direct power and influence of the people. At first, only members of the House of Representatives were elected directly. The president, senators, and the judiciary were either elected indirectly by state legislatures or the Electoral College, or were appointed. Today, we have universal suffrage for all major offices, including some judgeships. It’s voters in primaries rather than party bosses and party delegates who now pick the presidential candidates. That never used to be.

BRADY: All those changes happened by the turn of the 20th century.

GROSSMAN: No. It was only after the start of the 20th century that senators, for example, were elected directly by the people.

BRADY: By 1916, 80% of the states had primaries for Congress and the Senate.

GROSSMAN: But it wasn’t until television came along that the popular vote in presidential primaries really became the deciding mechanism in choosing presidential candidates. The Republican convention in 1976, when Gerald Ford barely beat out Ronald Reagan, was the last time a candidate was picked at a convention.

BRADY: By 1972, 85% of the delegates to presidential conventions were selected from primaries.

GROSSMAN: I’m not saying all these changes have occurred since the advent of the Internet. My point is that they are part of a trend that was accelerated by the rise of the electronic media, starting with radio and television and continuing with the Internet. The big political change has been the increasing ability to reach out to and target people individually through the electronic media, and for people to respond instantaneously.

BRADY: To my mind, the real change—and the real problem—created by the Internet is its splintering effect. There used to be an American experience on television—essentially ABC, CBS, and NBC. Now, everybody will be able to talk only with people who are like themselves. There will be zillions of Rush Limbaughs on the right and the equivalent on the left. Everybody will be in their own little niche, and it’s not clear that there will be any place where we will all listen to the same set of events.

GROSSMAN: It is certainly true in that everybody who wishes to will have access only to those with whom they agree. But all you have to do is see what happens with an Elian Gonzalez, O.J. Simpson, or Clinton impeachment story. There are still central news stories. The Internet chat rooms all discuss the same things, based on the same sets of syndicated news sources.

BRADY: I think there will be fewer common events. There may be some chat groups that discuss passionately what to do with the federal budget surplus, but not everybody will focus on that the way they focused on the Elian story.

Another issue will be what Congress does with the e-mail that floods in. Right now, congressional offices have no way to deal with it. They take a look at which position the e-mail is recommending and then delete it. That’s similar to how they handle the mail but in greater volume.

GROSSMAN: It’s getting to be very easy to form a group to address a political issue. All you have to do is send e-mails to some friends and, within a few days, you can generate hundreds of thousands of responses. These may end up being addressed directly to Congress, and, as you say, Congress is going to have to figure out some way to deal with them. Elected officials discount organized onslaughts, as they learned in the ’70s to discount those organized postcard campaigns that special interests spawned. But how congressmen do that is going to be more complex because, without much trouble, you can imagine millions of e-mails a day coming into an average member’s office.

A larger question is how we are going to fulfill the great potential of the digital and Internet technologies to serve the public interest. How do we increase citizens’ involvement in civic affairs? How do we use new technologies to reach into homes, schools, and workplaces to educate and inform people?

An interesting and important precedent exists for what we should be doing. In 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, Congress passed and Abraham Lincoln signed the Land-Grant College Act. It gave publicly owned frontier land to the states to sell, as long as the revenue was used for public higher education. The act revolutionized the educational system in this country. Today, 106 colleges and universities exist as a result of that far-sighted legislation. In the 21st century, the government is selling the publicly owned telecommunications spectrum. These incredibly valuable radio frequencies are this century’s equivalent of the 19th century’s frontier land. The revenue from those spectrum auctions, which Congress estimates will be tens of billions of dollars, should be invested in the future—used for education in its broadest sense, for skills and job training, teacher training, lifelong learning, preschool education, civic information, health information, and arts and culture.

Now, we have the tools capable of doing all that, but nobody has yet really addressed those opportunities and public policies in a meaningful way.

BRADY: Those are exactly the right kinds of questions.

Through distance learning, we are going to be able to have a Stanford or a Harvard or a Princeton education available to large numbers of people at a very cheap price. We know what we want education to do. We want to get more and better information to people on the grounds that if they have such information they can make reasonable choices. But the main thinking being done about that comes from companies that hope to make money from distance learning. I’m sorry to say I don’t know very many examples where people in government have sat down and thought very coherently about this area of public policy. That needs to happen.

Grossman can be reached at lkgrossm@aol.com. Brady can be reached at brady_david@gsb.stanford.edu.