Beyond the basic presentation of information, the Internet offers enormous potential for direct participation in the democratic process and increased political activism, organization and discussion. The 1996 presidential elections marked the beginning of the development of these trends. Several features of the Reform Party site offer a glimpse at the future of electronic democracy. Two major features of the site were focused on interactivity and direct democracy: the chat rooms and the use of the site as a virtual venue for the party's nominating convention. In different ways these features allowed users to interact with each other and with their party in real time, something that has been previously limited by geographic distance. The convention pages not only allowed users to keep tabs on the happenings in Long Beach and Valley Forge, but gave them an opportunity to take part in the convention via Internet voting and streaming audio and video of the festivities. In the case of the chat rooms, users with common interests were able to form an on-line constituency and community, with the Reform Party web site providing a venue in which they could discuss issues and share ideas.

The Reform Party Convention

The week of the Reform Party convention marked the biggest period of web site use for the party, and also its most significant coverage in the traditional media. During this period, the general patterns of usage within the site did not change significantly. Users visited the Principles of Reform, State By State and In the News sections in about the same proportions as they did throughout the entire campaign. The great influx of users visiting the site during this period, however, suggests that most were first-time viewers of the site. As Figure 8 shows, a very large number of those visiting the site during the convention period went to the special section set up for convention coverage. This is not surprising, given the attention place on the role of the site in the convention. However, it appears that almost every visitor to the convention section also visited the page with instructions for voting on-line. As the convention week progressed, there were gradually less hits on all pages, although voting continued to drop off even as overall use rebounded for the second weekend of the convention. All indications are that those who voted electronically did so early in the convention week.
While it is not possible to determine the actual number of votes cast electronically, this trend indicated that on-line voting drew a large number of visitors to the site. Whether this attention came from registered Reform Party voters or merely curious web surfers, it indicates that there is a significant interest in this type of electronic participation in the political process.

The Reform Party Chat Room

The Reform Party's chat page, which allows users to communicate in real time over the Internet, seems to have been the most popular feature of the site. On many days, hits associated with the chat program outnumbered the total number of hits on pages throughout the rest of the site. While this would seem to indicate that radically more visitors were using the chat rooms than anything else on the site, this is not necessarily the case. Every time a user posted a new message, checked for new messages, or entered a different chat "room," the program "chat.cgi" logged a hit. Thus, a single user could be responsible for a large number of hits in this area in just a short time, even without actively participating in the discussion. A more realistic picture of chat room use is painted by the introductory page, through which chat users must pass and register to access the chat program itself.
Over the course of the election season, the chat introduction was the second most popular internal page. The popularity of the chat room indicates that voters are going on-line to share their political ideologies. The broad appeal of the Internet is that it allows us to connect with those who share our common interests. In this case, the Reform Party web site has acted as a facilitator for those who share the goals and ideologies of the party to get together from all across the country and hopefully further their support of the party. Participants in such a chat room are likely to garner new insights and idea from the chat sessions, ideas they will likely promote within their local geographic communities. In a fall 1996 survey, users indicated that of all political activities, more (74.21 percent) participated in discussions of the issues than any other activity. However, in the same survey, only nine percent of users cited on-line conversations as a primary source of political information.²²
Thus, the high rate of use of the Reform Party chat rooms indicates a high level of political involvement among those users, although not necessarily a blind faith in the information presented in those chat sessions.
Another point to note about the number of hits received by the chat rooms is that most of the users of this part of the site were repeat visitors -- the same users would come back from day to day to participate in discussions and debates. This is a contrast with the rest of the site, where information pages generally garnered only one or possibly two visits from any given user. This is especially evident in the post-election use of the site, in which the number of visitors to the site dropped dramatically, but the use of the chat room remained fairly consistent.