At 7 p.m. Tuesday, Suzanne Simpson and two dozen of her closest friends will cluster around her home computer, snack on hors d’oeuvres and spend the next few anxious hours waiting to learn whether they have reason to celebrate.
It’s election night 1997, but there’s no reason for the candidate for Warren Township supervisor to traipse to the Lake County Courthouse after the polls close to monitor votes for her and opponents Shawn Depke, Glenn Ryback and Marianne Porecca.
With a few taps on her computer keyboard, Simpson will be able to fetch updated reports showing how many votes she’s getting, precinct by precinct, as fast as courthouse officials can post them.
For someone who’s still not quite sure of her computer’s capabilities beyond word processing, Simpson has made sure she has Lake County’s World Wide Web page memorized.
“It’s amazing the information that’s out there,” Simpson said. Without the Internet, she added, “we more than likely would have gone down to the courthouse and waited for the results, or stayed home and had somebody with a cell phone calling in.”
The scene will repeat itself throughout the Chicago suburbs, where clerks in Kane, McHenry and Will Counties also will post votes continuously, updating them every 10 minutes on-line. Cook County will offer election totals on its Web home page Wednesday morning.
It’s an electronic evolutionary step for government agencies, politicians and their consultants, who are joining high-tech entrepreneurs and voyeurs on the Internet.
The new milieu is cheap. It’s intriguing. It reaches people, although who they are and what they want remains fuzzy. And the immediate gratification of quickly posting vote tabulations has county officials excited.
“We’ve had e-mail back that people liked our site and thanked us for making election night real workable,” said Willard Helander, Lake County clerk.
Computer users tapped into the county page about 4,000 times during the Feb. 25 primary, the third election that Lake County carried on-line.
The Chicago Tribune will provide up-to-date election results in its six Digital Cities communities with contested races: Naperville, Schaumburg, Evanston, Hoffman Estates, Arlington Heights and Crystal Lake.
Other Chicago-area publications also plan to post live election numbers on their web sites.
Yet not everyone is enthused.
DuPage County government, for one, typically prides itself on being at the forefront of innovation. But although the county maintains a Web site, it offers no election information and is in no rush to do so, said Robert Saar, executive director of the DuPage Election Commission.
“Call us overly cautious,” Saar said, “but I guess until such time as we feel comfortable, we’re not going to make a move onto the net.”
Most computer users agree that the system has its problems, as was evident during last November’s general election. That night served as a cyber launching point for many local, state and national organizations to post live vote counts on the Internet.
But nationwide, the much-praised technology left thousands of people seething with frustration. The Internet was swamped, and many were unable to log onto popular political sites.
Within the smaller arena of local politics, candidates and officials say they have no doubt that interest in on-line election information will continue to grow.
“I am surprised at the feedback,” said Venita McConnel, campaign manager for the Wauconda TAG Team, a slate of candidates that recently posted its first Web page promoting the candidates’ qualifications. She said the group received about a dozen e-mail messages in response to the Web page.
County election offices also use the format to explain how to register to vote, where to cast ballots and how to vote an absentee ballot. Organizations such as the League of Women Voters post information about local issues and candidates, and national groups cover an exhaustive range of political matters.
“It’s a great way to disseminate information,” said Jan Gould, the clerk in Will County, which spends about $30 monthly to maintain its Web page.
Gould said the Web page helps officials reach residents who live in the far corners of the county. Some residents don’t have access to Joliet cable television channels or radio stations and often begin phoning the courthouse after the polls close to learn election results, Gould said.
In McHenry County, 21-year-old Webmaster Jason Ernst and one other consultant for McHenryCom Inc. in the November general election and February primary posted the county’s official election results and also displayed digital images of voters exiting the polls. The page was accessed 1,500 to 2,000 times both elections, he said.
The company is providing the service free to McHenry County for now, with hopes of eventually getting a contract for some Internet business from the county.
The Internet is such a new creature that research can’t really measure its impact on politics–or much else for that matter. Political scientists say that for now, computer users aren’t likely to change their minds or votes on a particular issue because of something they read on the Web.
“We’re a lot like we were 50 years ago with television,” said Bruce Bimber, professor of political science at the University of California in Santa Barbara. “Use is expanding, and there’s an enormous amount of interest in it. But no one in 1947 had the faintest idea of what was to come.”
Free-lance writer Dave Barnes contributed to this article.
WHERE TO FIND VOTE TOTALS ON THE WEB
Election information, including up-to-date vote tallies Tuesday night, are provided on the following Web sites:
Chicago Tribune Digital Cities sites
Arlington Heights: (http://chicago.digitalcity.com/vah/)
Crystal Lake: (http://chicago.digitalcity.com/crystallake/)
Evanston: (http://chicago.digitalcity.com/evanston/)
Hoffman Estates: (http://chicago.digitalcity.com/hoffmanestates/)
Naperville: (http://chicago.digitalcity.com/naperville/)
Schaumburg: (http://chicago.digitalcity.com/schaumburg/)
Government sites
Kane County: (http://www.mcs.net/kanedata/ballotsx.htm)
Lake County: (http://www.co.lake.il.us/cntyclk/index.htm)
McHenry County: (http://www.mcvote.org)
Will County: (http://www.mcs.net/willco/)
Cook County will post election results Wednesday morning at (http://www.cookctyclerk.com)
