The State By State section was designed to fill several very important needs for the Reform Party. First and foremost it acted as a clearinghouse for party organization information, a resource for those wishing to become more involved in local Reform Party efforts. In some ways this allowed the section to act as a recruiting tool for the party, making it easy for those who wanted to help out to join the party and to become involved at the local level. It also allowed those already involved an resource for contacting organizers in other states and to provide their own recruiting information. The California state page, for example, provided not only contact information and web site links, but also several special instructions for members to "Gather. Meet. Organize. Don't worry about formal structure."²¹ and information about how to register voters. While not all state pages provided such detailed information, the site fulfilled its important organization role by providing such an open database of state organizational activity.
The main page of the State by State section presented a color-coded map of the nation, depicting the party's ballot status in each state. By election day, the map was filled a solid blue, indicating that the Reform Party had made the ballot in all fifty states. This presentation probably had an important effect on party members and non-members alike, because it indicated the party's success throughout the nation. This builds pride among members who have volunteered at the local level, and was used to suggest the strength and momentum of the Reform movement.
While it is not possible to determine the geographic location of web site visitors, it is possible to gauge a rough estimate of the state-by-state breakdown of visitors to the Reform Party site. Because the map on the front page of the section provides no clear indication what information awaits a user who clicks on his or her state, those who visited the state pages were not necessarily looking for contact and volunteer information. However, users of the site were clearly interested to some extent in learning more about the Reform Party and its activities in their individual states. Not surprisingly, larger states' pages received more hits than did the pages of the smaller states. It is possible to discern a correlation between the number of hits a state's page received throughout the election period and how well the Reform Party fared electorally in that state. While the number of hits received by each state is of course influenced by a great many other factors, including computer use and political participation, some patterns do emerge. By comparing the number of votes in a state and number of hits on that state's pages, considered as a function of the number of voters in that state, we see that the states in which Perot faired the best electorally are also the states the most-visited pages at the Reform Party site. The top six vote-getting states for Perot all found their State By State pages among the top sixteen most visited. One notable exception is the visitation of the District of Columbia page. Perot received the lowest support at the polls -- just two percent -- in D.C., yet the District's page was the fifth most visited. This is likely a result of the fact that Internet-using residents of the District of Columbia are very likely to be personally involved in politics and show an interest in all political web sites, yet remain the most partisan of voters, mostly Democrats.
In the top quadrant of most-visited state pages, Perot averaged 10.6 percent of the statewide vote. In the second quadrant, he only averaged 9.2 percent, and he garnered an average of 8.6 and 8.4 percent in the bottom two quadrants, respectively. However, the total number of votes garnered by Perot shows quite the opposite trend, as shown in Figure 7. The top quadrant resulted in a net total of just over a half of a million Perot votes. The bottom quadrant brought in almost four million. Thus, while the states with the most-visited pages at the Reform Party site were those in which the party faired well electorally, they also tended to be much smaller states. There are several possible explanations for this trend. Since presidential candidates tend to focus their efforts on large states, supporters in small states are more dependent on the web, and less on television advertising by the candidates. The Reform Party may have managed to gain more support in these smaller states, where the major candidates were not battling to recruit Perot votes, and where the efforts of the Reform Party's grass roots organizations were relatively more visible.
Despite all of this, it is also unclear which way this relationship works: does high support cause high participation and web site visitation, or does organizational information provided by the web site lead to stronger state party organizations, which are able to turn more votes? Unfortunately, there is no way to measure the motives of visitors to a web site or page, so it is difficult to tell.