Internet, Media and Politics
Friday, November 12, 1999
2-3:15 p.m.

Larry J. Sabato: Welcome to our panel on the Internet, the Media and Politics as part of the e-summit. We're excited to have a terrific panel, some wonderful people, alumni and current students who have a lot of offer in this subject, a lot to suggest. We plan to keep the panel as informal as possible. We want to have a lack of back and forth discussion with the audience and I must tell you one of the members of this panel who'll shortly be introduced to you, Tim Robertson, a member of Board of Visitors came in, looked at the nice crowd, and said, "my goodness, I can't believe all these people are not at the session on wealth creation". I simply reminded me that this is the University and that's why they are not at the wealth creation symposium. That's why we invite alumni back, but that had best not been explained at the moment.

What I'm going to ask. I've learned a trick over the years in terms of introducing people. You either do too much. That is, exactly enough for the panelist's mother, or you do much too little, and insult them, and so I am simply going to ask each panelist to give his-- Yeah, all his. A very sexist panel, to give his name, his affiliation, and a little bit about his background that relates to the topic of this session--the Internet, the Media and Politics, and I want to start with Tim Robertson and I want to, if I can inject one thing, Tim and his wife Lisa have just given a marvelous and large gift to the University, setting up the Media Center at Clemons Library and I can guarantee you, Tim, a number of my students in this room have already been up there using it, benefiting from your generosity and we appreciate it enormously.

Timothy B. Robertson: Thank you, Larry. It's great to be here today. A couple of things I guess-- I'm still trying to figure out why I'm on this particular panel about politics, but I think one of the reasons is that the latest business endeavor that I'm involved with is called FamilyClick.com and it's an Internet service that intends to provide families a safe access point to the web, so that parents can be safe and secure that their children will not be visiting unwanted Websites. Many of you have probably done a search query and been rather surprised that when you wanted to find out where you buy the latest Barbie doll, something other than Barbie showed upon your search results. Additionally, unwanted e-mail has become one of the real banes of the Internet's existence and we have a product, we think, that can filter out unwanted e-mail for families, so in that regard, we're very much involved with public policy a sit relates to the Internet, what government is doing with respect to regulation of the Internet and what sort of private sector solutions may also be out there.

My previous experience was with the Family Channel and there I also served on several panels which were involved in direct lobbying efforts and industry-wide coalitions that were targeted to try to create certain new regulations that we're currently living with now, such as the v-chip and some things of that nature, so that's why I'm here I suppose.

Sabato: That makes a heck of a lot of sense tome, Tim. I also should say Tim, of course, is a University alumnus, Arts & Sciences. I think it was '76, wasn't it? We overlapped a couple of years

Robertson: '76, but my degree was actually'77. We won't go into that.

Sabato: Thank you very much. That's part of the college experience too. Now the fourth year fifth, now. Let's make that very clear. Next, Jeff Nuechterlein.

Jeffrey D. Nuechterlein: Well, I have the privilege of being one of Larry's first students here when he returned from Oxford to teach in the Honors Programs in Government and Foreign Affairs and he had a lot to do actually with me following my political interests in going into government. I spent a lot of my early years of my career working first in the Carter Administration which dates me and you a little bit, and--

Sabato: And him.

Nuechterlein: Yeah, right. I worked on the Senate Judiciary Committee on their technology subcommittee and I also most recently worked for the U.S. trade representative during the first Clinton administration, first term, but I also have had this lifelong love of technology. I was a lawyer for many years. I represented the U.S. semiconductor industry, individual U.S. semiconductor companies, and more recently over the last few years, I've essentially become an investor in early-stage Internet companies. Most of what I'm doing now are business to business companies and it's really a wonderful career to be in, I must say.

Sabato: Wonderful, Jeff, and he was a terrific government and foreign affairs honors student. He was in my first honors class those many years ago and we had a great time. Jeff also had a Virginia connection, that is Commonwealth of Virginia, as opposed to University of Virginia. He worked I believe for a while with Governor Wilder, did you not, in his term?

Nuechterlein: That's right.

Sabato: So, he's both national and state and we're happy to claim him for both, and some of you may know his dad, Don Nuechterlein who taught here for a number of years and frequently writes columns about international relations and is a wonderful fellow. Thank you very much for being with us, Jeff. On my right, we have one of our student members of the panel. He's easy for me to introduce because he has an unusual major at the University His major is Cavalier Daily. He's the editor-in-chief of the Cavalier Daily and the Cavalier Daily, as some of you who haven't been here in a while may be shocked to see the Cavalier Daily. It's a regular newspaper. It's long and it's got a lot of information in it and it's innovative and it's creative and this young man to my right has a lot to do with it. He's been a terrific editor and we're all grateful to him for it , but I know you have a technical major and I'm going to let you tell them what technically your major is.

Michael L. Greenwald: Technically, my major is psychology but like-- Can I call you Larry?

Sabato: Absolutely. Feel free.

Greenwald: Like Mr. Sabato said, it's actually psychology.

Sabato: For a brief time, yes.

Greenwald: Only today. But like he said, I'm the editor-in-chief of the Cavalier Daily and the Internet is really a place where we want to grow. We started in 1995 and today we actually have more readers on line throughout the country than we do in our print edition which is really quite amazing. We have a young and energetic web staff and the page keeps growing and growing, and it's something that we want to keep doing. We keep putting supplemental information on the Web and we want to become the University's main resource for history, and that's the direction that we're headed.

Sabato: And I do want to emphasize again--take a look at the Web site for the Cavalier Daily. You'll be surprised, I think, some of you, at how advanced it is. It's more advanced than many of the faculty sites. Many of us were in that generation that missed the Internet and I will tell you quite frankly, as embarrassing as it is, 95% of what I've learned about the Internet I've learned from my students. Education really is a two-way street. The difference is, of course, they pay tuition. I pay them nothing [laughter] and I intend to keep it that way.

Greenwald: I would like to say that a lot of Mr. Sabato's compliments are because we quote him three or four times a day.

Sabato: And that plus 60 cents is good for a cup of coffee. As I've learned over the years, that and a lot of trouble. The ones that are right, that is . Anyway, Mike, while you're calling me Larry, let's turn now to our second student member, John Eischeid and I hope I've pronounced that correctly, John. He's an English major with a minor in astronomy which is an interesting combination and he has been studying advertising on the Internet which I find fascinating as a topic and I hope John will tell us a little about it.

John Eischeid: I first got interested in the Internet about two years ago when I was doing an internship with a non-profit organization called CIVNET that spreads education and democracy over the Internet worldwide. Since then, this semester, I've started to get more interested in Internet advertising simply because it's a subject of debate right now. It's the first time producers have ever had a way to directly interact with consumers and to see exactly what their preferences are. There's a lot of monitoring goes on and that's basically what differentiates the Internet from other mediums. The legality of what these producers are doing is kind of a subject of debate right now. There's consumer advocacy groups that are just basically against it.

Sabato: Excellent, and we will have some questions for you as we go long, John, and thank you for being with us as well. Let's turn, last but not least, to my colleague from history, Professor Brian Balogh and this may be a surprise, again, to some in the audience. History may be focused on the past, but in terms of the Internet, it has been more advanced than most other academic fields and Brian has been involved in that and I hope he'll tell us a bit about it.

Brian Balogh: Well, I'm not sure quite why I'm on the panel. I think they wanted to be sure someone wore a tweed jacket because that always looks good on these kinds of panels. I am a student of politics and I studied 20th century political history and I guess I look at the developments on the web and the Internet in the historical perspective of along line of technological changes that have shaped politics and reacted to politics over the course of the 20thcentury.

Sabato: Wonderful, and we will look forward to that perspective being added to the panel as well. I am Larry Sabato. I was an undergraduate here in the early 1970s.I've been on the faculty here since 1978. It seems like forever, not just to me, but to many like Sandy Gilliam and the administration who've had to deal with me and the reason I'm doing this panel is obviously because my love is politics. In fact, for each of the panelists we have avery special gift from the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies which I direct, courtesy of my staff member Matthew [Wickswell] who's over here. Of course, my slogan is-- "politics is a good thing," and you all are official members now, a hell of a pact, for having done this panel. That stands for higher education lovers living at the University of Virginia political action committee officially registered with the Federal Election Commission. This could get you in trouble. I don't know.

We'll talk about this, but you'll each get this afterwards, but we also at the Center for Governmental Studies have a web site and much more importantly, our two state legislators here, both of them friends of mine and both of them having been helpful to the Center for Governmental Studies, Senator Emily Couric and Delegate Mitch Van Yahres. As they know we have just finished, I think, an interesting project. In fact, it is the largest Internet vote in American history to this point, and I say to this point, because I'm convinced that a lot more will be happening and very quickly, sooner rather than later. You know the terrible decline in civic participation that we've all witnessed over the past decades and this particular center, the Center for Governmental Studies is devoted to a very simple proposition that we have to do something to improve civic education and civic participation. They go hand in hand among both older voters and younger voters, and we've decided to target younger voters first because we think that if we can reach them in high school and middle school and elementary school, we'll have a good chance of keeping them involved, so this year, as a pilot project.

In fact, involving the local races, Mitch is so popular, he was unopposed and he has an Italian method of going about staying opposed. I'll tell you that after it's over. I can say that an Italian American. Just watch your knees [laughter], but Emily was running for her second term. She had opposition. She won in a massive landslide and I think our Center for Governmental Studies and the pilot project had something to do with it, but as Emily can tell you, we had a pilot program here and in 10 other localities in Virginia where over 10,000 young people voted by Internet and they all had a security code. The ballot was encrypted. Their ballot was precisely the same as the one their parents had when they went to the polls one Election Day.

Many of the high schools had up to 40 different ballots because, of course, the high school boundaries don't match the legislative boundaries, so we had to have all those ballots ready for all those kids. They had a ball. They conducted debates for the candidates. They asked questions. Emily and her opponent went through that and the students moderated the debate and asked the questions and they were a lot tougher than the questions asked by reporters and issue-oriented. They didn't ask them about bedroom behavior. They asked them about issues and it was fascinating to watch. Then they reported from their high schools to the TV stations, but most importantly, they conducted that ballot at their schools via computer and the results incidentally in over 90% of the cases from legislature down to sheriff. I guess I shouldn't have put sheriff last. He can arrest you.

From top to bottom of the ballot, in 91% of the cases, the students ended up picking the very same people the general population did and the margins were similar. That was fascinating tome, but the point is involvement. The point is education. The point is participation. And that's really what the Internet is all about and so the first question I want to ask this panel as we look toward a fascinating election cycle involving the presidency and a third of the Senate and all 435members of the House of Representative and a dozen governorships and thousands of state legislative positions and local positions, how is the Internet changing politics in this very next election cycle. Not 20 years down the pike, when we might be voting by Internet. How is going to change things just within the next few months? Let's get some ideas on this and why don't I just start off by running down the line and starting with Tim if I can.

Robertson: Sure. I brought a prop from yesterday's U.S.A. Today. It says "Venture Links Folks to GOP and the Net." I don't know if you saw this, but this is actually a commercial venture where folks can sign up to the Internet through what's called an infinite program, pay their money for their monthly fee and part of that money goes to their political party. In this case, it's the Republicans. I think one of the unique things that the Internet allows is the ability for discrete groups to be clearly identified and to tap into an information source that is, in the case of the person in the group, would say unedited. Now, whether it's edited or not is another matter, but some radical things have been happening in politics in the last10 years.

One that was very unusual in the '96 races was for the first time one political party decided that it was going to telecast its national convention and pay for the air time so they could have complete uncut, unadulterated, uncommercialized television coverage of a convention, and that was the Republicans in '96, because basically with all due respect to the Republicans, it was so dull thatno national network wanted to carry it in prime time, and so they said we've got to bypass the traditional process. We don't want Sam Donaldson. We don't want Dan Rather giving editorials. We just want the American people to see what we're doing and the Internet is that in a microcosm and frankly, it's a whole lot cheaper than having to buy time on cable networks or wherever else, where a party can now reach out to its own constituents in a direct fashion and the loyalists can get charged up because one of the issues that we do face today is it's still a game of if you bring more people to the polls than the other guy, you win and generally speaking, what has begun to happen in our party politics today is that the loyalists aerate ones who swing the ballots and if you can get the core group out, you can generally have a tremendous amount of impact in an election, so I think one of the issues that the Internet is doing for both parties and forindividual candidates and for people who can break through is breaking downthe walls that traditionally have existed where there's access problems because the Internet creates a situation where you as a candidate and you as a party can have direct access to your constituents.

There's no more gatekeeper. We don't have to depend on whether you get your three minutes at6:30 on a national news program. You can have it 24 hours a day, so you have the post-it bulletin boards, you have any number of things. You can have every candidate record every speech they ever make and there it is, live with streaming audio, streaming video, however you want it and I think frankly one of the reasons that the '94 elections were so sweeping for the Republicans was the fact that they began to use the Internet earlier than the Democrats and actually had their own internal networks set up where they were communicating with their constituents better and quicker than the other guys and I think it's going to just continue as we go forward.

Sabato: I liked your point particularly about gatekeepers. That's been a complaint for years from people on both the right and the left who consider the news media to be biased in various and sundry ways and they are biased. They are human beings. All human beings carry biases with them whether we want to admit or not, except for political analysts. We don't have any, but with that one exception, it's there and this is what the Internet promises. It's a disillusion of the role of gatekeepers. They can't control the flow of information the way they once did. Some of them are very unhappy about it.

I watched an interview with some friend Doug Bailey. I think you know Doug who used to be apolitical consultant for many years Now he's the editor-in-chief of the "Hot Line," the bible of politics that comes out at noon each day. Everybody who loves politics gets a hold of that thing and it's like 50 pages long, single-spaced typed. It kills two hours in the day, but it's worth reading. It has everything that's happened in the last 24 hours in all 50states and in national politics. He's just launched this thing called Freedom Channel.com and it is every TV ad aired across the United States by the candidates for president and for other offices and you can call it up at any time you want to and watch on your time, not the news media's time.

He had an interview with Judy Woodruff on CCN's Inside Politics and I like Judy Woodruff. I've known her for years, and she started off the interview saying "why are you coming at us like this? What is it about the news media that is inadequate? What are we doing wrong that causes this to be an assessment?" They sense that they're losing their gatekeeper role and they don't like it, but maybe other people do. Maybe other people do. Jeff, what do you think?

Nuechterlein: Well, there're all sort of ways that the Internet is changing politics and we could spend hours on this, but given the allotted time, I'm just going to run through a series. One is that just look at the number of Americans on the Internet. In 1996, it was only about 7_ million, so for the last presidential election cycle, 7_ millions had access to the Internet. Today, it's 67million and it's growing quickly. By the next presidential election, it will be probably at least double that. In 1996, political web sites were basically a novelty. You would announce that you had one and it would be up, but it may not be updated. There was a lot of stale information on those web sites three years ago and that's all beginning to change Web sites are being updated daily now by the campaigns and they're really becoming much more of a useful information source. I think by the year 2004, by that presidential election cycle, the Internet really will have an integral part in the campaign. Some have speculated that up to 80% of every political dollar contributed to a presidential candidate and at 2004 will be contributed online in 2004.

Now, let's just stop for a second and talk about where fundraising is at the moment with regard to the Internet. First of all, it's escalating. It's still a small percentage of the total amount of dollars being raised, but it's gaining pretty rapidly. Bradley is the clear leader here. He's raised$650,000.

Sabato: How does it do it?

Nuechterlein: He does it because he's got a good web site and he directs people to his Web sites. Now, $650,000 is only about 3_% of the total amount of dollars that Bill Bradley has raised to date, but still it's starting to pick up some speed. The second largest amount has been raised by McCain and he's also sort of about 3_% of his total dollars. Interestingly, Gore who is the most associated of any candidate with the regard to the Internet, trails Bradley, McCain and Bush. He's only raised $80,000 on line which is less than 1% of his total. Now, the cost of on-line fundraising is cheap compared to direct mail. A typical direct mail pitch would cost about 30 to 40cents per address and it would yield a response rate, a positive response rate, of about 1 o 1_%.Internet banner ads have a similar yield, but they only cost about 10 cents or even less than 10cents, so same yield, about a quarter of the price. Now, e-mail solicitations cost about 50 cents to$1.00 so more than the typical direct mail, but the response rate is 10 to12%, up from 1% for the typical direct mail solicitation.

Also, remember that on-line contributors generally give more than off-line contributors and just to give you an idea of the cost, Bradley spent about $300,000 to raise $2million for direct mail purposes. He raised the $650,000 on the Internet. It cost him almost nothing. A typical Web site for a political candidate is something around $50,000 and all you're doing is you're just asking for it on line.

The other thing I'd mention with regard to fund raising on the Internet is that the direct mail universe is about 12 million potential users. A large percentage of those direct mail recipients are older voters. That finite and aging universe is going to be dwarfed by the Internet universe, so for all those reasons, I think that political fund raising is going to continue to pick up.

Now, let me talk about a couple of other things with regard to how the Internet is reducing costs. It's obviously reducing costs for brochures and that sort of thing, but it's also reducing the costs of advertising. Obviously, you know what the cost of a 60-second ad on national television is during a major event. What does it cost you to do an advertisement on your own Web site? Obviously nothing. The cost of the Internet ads is very low on other peoples' sites, but the other thing that's important to remember about Internet advertising is that it can be directed and targeted to specific voters, so, for instance, if you're a pro choice candidate, you can target who's pro choice and send only those voters that pro choice ad, or you can have ads in Spanish directed to Hispanic voters, and so it's much easier to actually narrow in on potential voters than it was atone point.

Sabato: Politicians wouldn't do that, would they, Jeff?

Nuechterlein: That's what you taught me.

Sabato: They wouldn't narrow cast like that, would they?

Nuechterlein: And then the last thing I'd say with regard to advertising is that it's much easier to measure the effectiveness of political ads than it's ever been before. There's wonderful software out there now. [Crew] makes a wonderful software package where they can tell you who's visited your web site, where do they go within your web site, what pages did they spend the most amount of time on, what resonates with those voters and what page did they leave your Web site from, so that that might be a page that you might want to reconfigure. There's obviously a lot more information for candidates on voters generally. Candidates can go out and actually buy lists of voters from other web sites so you could target environmental voters by going to environmental sites and buying those lists from them, and also as Larry mentioned, and as Tim mentioned, there's a lot more information from voters than there ever has been. Rather than just having a few TV networks now giving you information, there're hundreds of web sites where you can go. Obviously, the candidates' web sites but then a lot of other web sites, other issue-specific or non-partisan. In some cases, there're partisan web sites, but think about the other ways that the Internet has changed life for voters.

It makes it much easier to go and look at the Federal Register or the Congressional Record. Rather than going over to Alderman, you can just sit in your dorm room now and pull that up. Think about the effect that Matt Drudge had on President Clinton. Newsweek wouldn't run the Lewinsky story, but here we have an on-line reporter that went out and broke this story.

Sabato: It would've gotten out anyway, believe me.

Nuechterlein: It would've, but it happened on the Internet, and the other thing the Internet did was it disseminated that Star report much faster than it ever would've been disseminated before the Internet was in existence. And then the last thing I would say with regard to more information for voters is we know a lot more about who's giving what amount to what candidate. You can get it on the FEC site and, to his credit, Bush has listed every contribution on that Website and I think that's really going to be the future.

Just very quickly, a couple of other things. The Internet has made it much more efficient to (a)recruit volunteers and then (b) to use volunteers in a meaningful fashion. Of 500,000 visitors to Bradley's sites in the last year, 14_% have filled out forms to register as volunteers and the other thing to remember here is that e-mail makes it much easier to coordinate volunteers than it's ever been before. Rather than picking up a phone or enlisting a whole army of supporters to go out there and get volunteers to do x, y and z, you can blast e-mail them and it just makes it less costly and lot more efficient.

Then the other thing I would say is polling is going to change. It's already changing. Critics obviously would say that the Internet is not very good for polling because of the demographics. You have many more younger voters on the Internet and it's maybe not as good a representative sample, but in 22 elections in 14 states in 1998, on-line polls for Harris predicted winners in 21elections compared to only 17 winners by traditional phone polling.

The last thing I'll say is the Internet is changing politics tremendously by its interactive nature and this is what makes the Internet so superior to television is the ability to interact rather than only to receive a message.

Sabato: Those are some great examples, Jeff, and I thank you for the good research. In fact, that pretty much summed up the panel. If any of you have to leave[laughter], feel free to go. I agree with everything you said, save I do need to warn the audience that the Harris interactive polling is extremely controversial and most people in the field of public opinion are highly critical of his methods in polling using the Internet and, in fact, he just flubbed the Mississippi gubernatorial election terribly. I mean, he was so far off it was embarrassing. It made the Gallup polls of 1948 look accurate, so I think he's got a lot of work to do before that ever works and part of it, and I want to ask you all about this in turning to the other side of our panel over here, taking what Tim and Jeff have just said, number one, were there any aspects of the new politics via the web they've just described that bothered you or worried you a bit.

Secondly, isn't a fundamental problem here the economic divide. Some people call it the racial divide. In some places, it's even a gender divide though that seems to be less of a factor than the racial divide or the economic divide in simply who has computers. Who has computer skills? Who can tap into the resources of the web? That's part of the equation too. What do our students think about and then we'll get Brian to wrap this part of it up?

Eischeid: About the racial and economic divide, that is going to be narrowed, I think. There's already groups that are starting to provide computer access to lower income housing, housing projects like that. I think Gateway has already donated $50,000 for this purpose, and there's a couple other computer companies that are following suit.

Sabato: Well, we hope they continue. They certainly have the resources to do it. Hint, hint.

Greenwald: I think the key here is that the Internet provides unlimited information and anybody, if it's 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday, you can go to the Internet. You can go to the WashingtonPost.com. You can go to candidate's web page. If it's a presidential candidate like Al Gore, to a local candidate like Senator Couric, you find out what they think on any issue. You can e-mail them. You can contribute to their campaign. You can do anything you want. You can do it at any time, and it's essentially free once you have an Internet access and you have a computer, and I think that's what's really important is that it really opens up politics to anybody that can use the Internet and it really opens up politics to younger generations of people who in previous years weren't that interested, but now you can sit at your computer, like I said, and go check it out. You can check out what any media outlet says about a candidate, what any candidate says about themselves, what any candidate says about the person that they're running against, and it's accessible at any time and any point. You don't have to wait for the newspaper to come out. You don't have to wait for the TV show to come on. It's totally accessible anytime.

Sabato: Good. Brian--

Balogh: Well, I think that the panelists made a number of terrific points. We've talked about discrete groups. We've talked about gatekeepers. I think stepping back a little bit, the impact of the Internet is going to exacerbate some of the existing problems that we have. I think we have a big problem with access and participation when only 50% of the electorate votes, the eligible electorate votes, and Larry is somebody who's talked about that a lot. I think we know that access to computers is scarce. I'm delighted that our student members are optimistic. I'm less optimistic about closing that gap. I'm more concerned about what the Internet tends to do to one of the major problems that we have had since World War II in American politics and that's the disproportionate impact of interest groups. In my opinion, the Internet tends to exacerbate that problem by favoring well-organized interests and since the late '60s, we have had a particular problem with the issue of single issue groups.

Looking at this issue of discrete groups, it seems to me that the Internet really plays into the hands of single issue groups and further fractures American politics at a time that we need some gatekeepers if you want to call them. We used to call them political parties. Some coalitions that worked on a national broader level that tend to weigh the various interests and come up with reasoned decisions weighing the broad interests as opposed to favoring the last special interest group that happens to mobilize a lot of e-mail traffic.

Sabato: Listening to what Brian is saying, I think he's raising a critical concern and a disturbing trend that can only be accelerated by the spread of the Internet and combine that with what Jeff was suggesting about what you can do politically and in campaigns, whether it's campaigns for public office or campaigns to get bill x passed in the House or the Senate. When you combine these two, you realize that unless the parties get busy and start doing a much better job, the interest groups really are going to be empowered. They're the ones who have the money and the interest to do it. They tend to be at the ideological extremes, the ideological polls, rather than the middle.

Balogh: I just want to make one more comment on what people have said here. Maybe I should have been at the Creation of Wealth panel, but it seems to me that we've talked a lot about the supply side. There is no question that the Internet and the web supply a vast amount of information and certainly as a scholar, as a student of politics, I think that's terrific. We haven't talked that much about the demands question, and a survey of voters who said that they had used the Internet in the last year coming out of the polls in 1998 showed that only 12% of those voters got political information from the Internet. Now, these are people who're already on the Internet and I think there's a real problem there between providing wonderful material. Rich material goes into much greater dept than ever, but demand for it by the potential voters out there who are using that Internet to look at lot of things other than politics which has been basically the story of entertainment versus politics across the whole 20th century.

Sabato: That's for sure, and some interesting statistics that partly underline what you said in part may provide another side, but let me just cite these to you. These surveys were all taken within the last two months about the Internet. One simply surveyed Congressional staffers about the habits of their members. Seventy-four percent of members of Congress use a computer everyday and just about all the rest don't use a computer at all. I'll bet you any amount of money the vast majority of those who don't use a computer were elected decades ago, and they see no need to change.

A couple of other facts that I found very interesting. On voting via the Internet which is our next topic anyway--if you were offered voting on the Internet as a method of voting in 2000 (this is to a random sample of Americans)--if you were offered that as a method of voting in 2000, would you be inclined to use it? Yes--57%. No--40%. I'm not sure that I believe that and one reason I don't believe it is because other questions contradict it. For example, if the law were changed to vote on the Internet, what is the likelihood that you will vote on the Internet? Only 23% said that they were very likely; 51% said that they were not at all likely and one reason, the main reason, why the 51% said they were not at all likely is because they don't have a computer and they're not on the net, so that's a very good reason for not voting that way, though I assume we would provide them with computers at libraries and other stations, but still, that's not the same as having it in the home and the question is what does it mean to have Internet voting. What are the problems that obviously potentially you could increase voter turnout? But at what cost and that's what I'd like to ask the panel. At what cost would we be increasing voter turnout if we had voting via the Internet as an option, not replacing going to the polls, not replacing absentee ballots? You'd still have those methods of voting, but as an alternative to the current methods of voting. Anybody want to start us off? Jeff--

Nuechterlein: I'll do it. Well, one of the reasons here that people are talking about Internet voting is just that so many people are on line but another reason is because of the percentage of Americans that are voting in presidential elections, for instance. In1960, we had 63% of eligible Americans voters voting. In 1996, it was 49%, so less than half. One of the things that I think is interesting, actually, is how few political Internet sites actually offer information on registering to vote, how to register. That's been true of the political candidates and the other political sites. Now, it's beginning to change, but if you look back over the last two or three years, there's startling little information on that issue.

Now, just from an historical standpoint, we have had major changes in voting in the past. Of course, in the 19th century, voting was a public act and you knew what everybody was voting for and what their positions were and so forth, and it was towards the end of the last century that we made voting a private situation where you had secret ballots and the other major change that we've introduced is registering to vote which really took place early in this century, so it wouldn't be the first time that we have had a major change in the way we vote in this country.

The other thing I'd say along these lines is that we already are seeing some experiments here. The first Internet voting that I have run across in the U.S. took place in Washington state in a little community that was trying to determine whether or not they should offer kindergarten year around and they had 560 votes and 103 were on line, so it's already happened here. States have started to debate whether or not they should allow on-line voting. California and Florida are two states.

Sabato: Ohio, too.

Nuechterlein: Right. Actually quite a few states and it's happening abroad. England's looking at whether or not they should allow electronic voting. Several countries have already had e-voting. Brazil, Costa Rica, Sweden and Finland have already experimented with on-line voting. Now, the proponents would say basically that you need to allow on-line voting to (a) it's more efficient clearly; (b) it's cost effective; and (c) it's relatively easy and for all those reasons, turnout probably would increase, and the other thing that you can say is that the proponents would say is that the percentage of young Americans voting would go up because a percentage of young Americans that are on line is much higher than older Americans, so we might get more Americans at that sort of 40 and under range voting.

Now, the opponents, I would sort of say have four major arguments. One is access. They would claim that the Internet is stratified by race and class. The counter to that, of course, would be something that you mentioned, Larry, and that is you could set up Internet voting in communities, in libraries, for instance, and community centers and so forth. Secondly, opponents would say that it might reduce voter turnout because it would be easier to ignore what's happening on election day, meaning that you wouldn't have the masses of people going to the polls if they're all sitting in their offices or in their home voting, and that it might, in fact, create more apathy. A third argument is fraud. That basically you couldn't necessarily track whether or not somebody had the right to vote and maybe Illinois would be worse at this than some other states.

Sabato: Louisiana. Don't forget about Louisiana.

Nuechterlein: But frankly, that's a specious argument because we already have the technology, the encryption technology, to allow secure credit card transactions on line and that's the same sort of technology that you would use for voting. The fourth major argument would be that voting is much more than just declaring a political preference that is a public ritual that increases social solidarity and you either believe that and that that's important and we should limit it to that, or you believe that we should basically join this next century and I, for one, am certainly a stronger supporter of allowing people to vote easily and I think the Internet offers that.

Sabato: One footnote to Jeff on fraud. There's some danger of fraud clearly although you have to go to a lot of effort to even get control of one ballot as we've discovered in our experiment and I see Ken Stroup back there, the director of our mock election voting. He can tell you more about it if you're interested. Ken, just wave your hand so they know who you are. See him afterwards if you want to talk about it, but it takes a lot of work to get one ballot. I don't want to increase cynicism. God knows I don't want to increase cynicism. It's too high already. However, if I could just add one little thing. I've got news for you. If you think our current system has no fraud in it, you haven't been around politics very long. Now, some states are worse than others and Jeff mentioned some and I mentioned one, in particular. I love Louisiana but they're crooked. I offended someone from the Bayou state here. Did I say that sir? I take it back. It was a misquote. It's a classic Cavalier Daily misquote. I'm just kidding. Whoever said that, but even in this state, there are problems with fraud.

We did a major study on Alabama, California, Texas, Pennsylvania and Kentucky and in those states we found major examples of fraud. Am I talking about tens of thousands of votes that would switch elections? No. Am I talking about enough fraudulent ballots to change close races or local elections? Absolutely. You'd better believe it, so let's remember, there may be fraud with e-voting but I think it's tough and it's limited and there's fraud with our current system. Other comments. Yes, Brian.

Balogh: Just for the record, I support e-voting. I think it will be beneficial in the short run for many of the reasons that Jeff listed on the positive side. I'm worried about listing symbolic public value in voting . I think you might ask Mike Halt in the back of the room for a date more or less when that went out. I'd say somewhere in the 19th century. I'm not worried about losing that. I am very worried about the blurring the line between public opinion polling and voting. As we start taking public opinion polls over the Internet, and as we start voting over the Internet, I worry very much about a move towards a more plebiscitary democracy in which major decisions are made based on snapshots of the American mind at a particular time and place as opposed to a deliberative democracy that debates and considers issues, and I think in the long run, that's a very serious challenge to the problem of e-voting.

Sabato: That's a great point. Tim, do you have a comment on this?

Robertson: Actually, no.

Sabato: No. Okay. That's a rare comment from panelist on anything.

Robertson: I will say that this issue, I find a couple of these comments to be interesting about the whole point of view with respect to the gatekeepers and the idea of--I have to say relative to the idea that political parties should serve a role as gatekeeper, I have to disagree with that vehemently. I think part of the democracy that we have in America is that one person has one vote and they should be able to holler their opinion as loudly as they want and the idea that somehow that it would all roll up into some greater good or whatever and then they're suppressed. to me is just not the way it's supposed to be, so otherwise we end up with some kind of oligarchy with Plato's great guys in the cave somewhere coming out telling us what we're all supposed to do and I find that to be somewhat troubling.

Sabato: I understand what you mean. I'm in favor of Mt. Olympus as long as I can be there. I'm all in favor of it, but I know what you mean. I understand what you're saying there. I've been told that this session absolutely positively without any question, and I will be shot if it goes longer, must end at 3:15. I actually have a number of other topics I would like to discuss with this panel. However, I also recognize a number of students and others, alumni, who have strong opinions about these matters and I would like to entertain a few questions. If we don't secure enough questions to carry us to 3:15, we'll be delighted to go back to lecturing to you, but for the time being, let me see if we have a few questions. We have some mikes and you have to go out to the mike and I'm delighted to see your hand and come on out. Line up at these mikes. We'll take you all. See, I knew they were anxious to participate. Yes sir. Tell us your name, who you are and what your justification is for being alive . Something like that.

Audience question: I'm not sure I have a great justification.

Sabato: That's all right. None of us do.

Audience question/Roy: My name is Chip Roy and I have a master's in MIS at the Comm School. I'm now back here working for the Alumni Association and the University in the Hoo's On Line project which is the alumni data base on-line. Check it out--www.hoosonline.va.edu.

Sabato: Oh, my God. It's Jerry Brown all over again. 1-800-vote for me.

Audience question/Roy: Something that struck me this morning was we had two hours of topics that all these wonderful folks that are gracious enough to come here talked about .Everybody's extolling the virtues of using the Internet for all these wonderful purposes and especially one of the topics was voting on the Internet and people said absolutely yes and everybody said that's great. Mr. Balogh finally brought up the one point that has stuck with mefor a long time that I'm very concerned about we're missing the philosophical problem with voting on line being there're two facets to it. One is voting specifically for a representatives. That's to me okay once we get past the security and anonymity issues. That's fine, but then when you start getting to voting on particular issues, what Mr. Balogh said rings true to me and one thing-- I researched this last year and one of the things that stuck with me in the Federalist Papers, Madison in I think it's Paper Number 10, said the republic "secures the public good and private rights against the danger of faction and at the same time preserves the spirit in the form of popular government." Jefferson said that "we must bear in the mind the sacred principle that the will of the majorities in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable, that the minority possess their equal rights which equal law must protect and violate would be oppression."

It seems to me that would the 64 right have passed we had a computer in every home, then probably not. Maybe now you'd like to think maybe, but you start getting really dangerous when you start putting the power of voting on every issue in the homes of every person out there, educated, uneducated, however you want to view it. It doesn't really matter why people vote the way they do. There's a reason for a republic and our founders knew that and we have a republic, not because of geographical limitations but because it is a form of government that has proven successful, so I'd just like to get feedback on that.

______________: Why didn't you major in history?

Audience question/Roy: I'm debating law school, debating politics.

Sabato: Let him raise some money. You helped this panel out because as you know, we're required to quote Mr. Jefferson at least once in every session so I do appreciate that. Brian, Tim, I think you're both interested in commenting.

Robertson: I couldn't agree you with more. I think that's the whole issue of representative democracy that sometimes you have to make a decision that may not be popular, so all I've got to say and I think my colleague Brian will agree with me. Fight any attempt to have initiative and referendum in Virginia. I feel very strongly about that. That's somethingI 'll go to the mat for. I'll give you a local politics response to that. We're paying a horrible price for that very thing in southeast Virginia and Virginia Beach because the City Council decided that they had no guts. In the last three major initiatives were all put to direct vote and the opponents of the initiatives said, hey, it's going to cost you more money so, of course, they lost and obviously maybe I'm showing my colors with respect to how I believe about the initiatives, but when certain things come up, people sometimes have to bite the bullet and make the hard choice and if everything becomes a matter of local referendum, you're always going to be under the possible tyranny of the well-funded interest group who can get a message out and scare everybody else to death and I really think it's a very important issue that we have to look at as we go forward.

Sabato: Brian, did you have a further comment on that?

Balogh: No, no. I said what I thought on the issue.

Sabato: Yes, Jeff.

Nuechterlein: I have one additional comment and that is, look, there's no question that on-line polling's going to continue to increase. It's going to get more effective and it's going to be omnipresent without any question. Fortunately, we have a checks and balances systems that's going to make it harder for us to become a referenda society fortunately, but the most important thing is to elect representatives that have backbone and that are not just always subservient to what the latest polls tells them to do. We need to continue to have a deliberative democracy and that's really the key to battling this issue that you've raised and letting it get out of hand.

Sabato: And we have two of those people right here in the front row. That's exactly right. Mitch van Yahres and Emily Couric who consistently support the University of Virginia and if they don't, I'm going to remind them of this session. Thank you so much.

Audience question/[Belasco]: Paul Belasco from the Darden School. A question that I have and I think I'm going to direct to you, Jeff, to begin with relates to the issue of getting by the issue of gaps between the haves and the have nots in the area of info technology as it relates to polling and as it relates to perhaps voting. You commented earlier that there're about 67 million people on the net. We had a gentleman who's trying to get black businesses onto the net recently and the recent statistics on that are that out of about 34 million black Americans there's about10% penetration, much lower than some of the other demographics that we have of America as a whole. How do you deal with the issue of polling, the issue of access, the issue of getting past what you call the stratification between the haves who might get through voting, simplicity of voting, encouraging them to vote more because they have computers at the home and they're comfortable with it versus a group that might have the same very fears that they have now about voting and the same reasons they have for not going to a polling place. Do you really feel that computers in a library and in a polling place mitigate the issues that we currently have now?

Nuechterlein: Well, I don't think that they mitigate completely the issues but certainly if you went to electronic voting, you would have to make electronic voting available to everyone in some relatively easy fashion, and that would be that difficult to do. You could actually walk a voter through the process of voting on line. It probably would be simpler than actually going behind a curtain frankly, or could be. I think the issue of stratification is one that plagues our society across not just technology but in many areas--education and so forth. With regard to the Internet specifically, I think as was said this morning, in five or 10years, we won't be talking about going on line to get something accomplished or we learned this online. We'll just be saying we got this information and it will be, I think, pretty much as available as the telephone is today and the vast majority of people will be on it, but there's still Americans that don't have a telephone and those are the issues that are going to be relevant to this issue of electronic voting going forward and polling, and I think this goes back to Larry's comment about how poor Harris Interactive was down in Mississippi. It was partly for this exact reason of actually capturing a snapshot of the entire voting population, not just those that might be interacting on the Internet.

Sabato: And it wasn't just the African American population. It was rural African American population and that was the main source of the problem as best we can determine. Any other comments about the question? Thank you very much for your question. We appreciate it. Let's go to this gentlemen.

Audience question/[Aram]: Hi. I'm Ethan Aram. I'm in the engineering school and I'm involved in several e-commerce projects right now. I've seen a fair amount of evidence of political mudslinging. You go and type in the name of your favorite candidate and up comes one site promoting candidate and 50 other blatantly false sites that are saying various things about your favorite candidate. Where do you see this trend going? Can you give some specific examples of other things that are being done and can you see of any remedies to this problem?

Sabato: Good question, because it's a major problem of dirty tricks in politics mixed with the web now. Brian--

Balogh: I think that in terms of Larry's first question--impact on the 2000 election. This type of negative advertising transferred to the net may be one of the factors that has the largest impact on this next election coming up. What campaigns have done to counter it is to surf the net, find out what's out there, and put on their own authentic home page the real information. That's pretty much been the strategy and those campaigns have done that, have been out there surfing to find out what's being said about their own candidate that's incorrect have been the campaigns that have been the most successful in combating it, but it is a real-- It's thee-version of the negative advertisement, but it often takes a while for campaigns to even find out that it's out there.

Sabato: One of your colleagues here, John, is looked into this and has a comment on it.

Eischeid: One other thing that candidates have started to do is register themselves or rather buy URLs are derogatory to them, you know, Bill Bradley does this, Bill Bradley does that, and that way they have ownership of it and nobody else has access to it. I don't know if you realize it but you URLs are pretty much the best way to drive traffic to a site--simple, concise, easy to find and easy to remember.

Sabato: And by the way, the Bush campaign has purchased more than 30 of those sites. Anything they can think that's obscene and they missed enough so that they already have problems. There're sites that pop up when you think you're getting the official Bush site that it's very quickly apparent to you that it's not the official Bush site unless he's trying to self-destruct, which he may be. Candidates enjoy doing that, but I don't think that's happening. What are the solutions though? What can be done about this? Is it cyber squatting? What's that term they use on these sites and then these people attempt to make 30 grand by selling people their own names. It's outrageous. It's wrong.

Greenwald: I think the problem is that on the Internet anyone can be a publisher. It's cheap. It's easy. All you have to do is get a URL and you can put up anything you want. There're not a lot of regulations and as soon as you publish that which really anybody can do with limited knowledge of computers, then anyone in the world can access your information and that's a major problem with where the media's going, I think, on the Internet.

Sabato: And that's happened to some media organizations too. They've had phony sites set up that look like them. Any other comments on that?

Robertson: There's a great one called AllGore. It's pretty funny.

Sabato: All Gore. That's right.

Robertson: Instead of Al Gore. It's actually clever. Some of them are not so clever.

Sabato: As someone once said to me, the first amendment is a big fat problem, but we're stuck with it and in the end, I guess that's a big part of the answer for that big fat problem, but you asked a good question and there're a lot of dirty tricks. Political people are among the most ingenious people on the face of the globe, at least in my experience. They're the smartest people I've ever met. The problem is they're smart about good things and they're smart about bad, dirty things and if there's a way to corrupt the process in favor of their candidates, they'll find a way to do it. I said consultants, not candidates. They're good people. They're good people. But it's just a problem and it's going to continue to be a problem and in the end, you have to hope that people will be intelligent consumers. Maybe that's the real problem. Let's go to this side. Here we go. Yes mam.

Audience question/Paola san Miguel: My name is Paola san Miguel. I am a 1998 graduate from the political and social thought program at the University, and I'm currently working for the University Library. I'm a web designer and information architect for them, but the one thing that I want to address is I seem to get this idea from a lot of things that you've said, that the Internet is free or very cheap or so on and so forth, and we're talking about accessibility and we've addressed the concept of the gap in terms of are there users on line, a clear cross-section of the American constituency and all these different issues, and it seems to me that I'd like to clarify something and then ask a question concerning this. First of all, there area lot costs involved in being an active user of the Internet. That is, infrastructurally, you need to have equipment and you need to have access to it and there is a monthly fee associated with phone lines and also access if you do it through certain commercial providers. There's also a level of literacy that is often overlooked in this area and it's not just an issue of being able to read. It's an issue of being able to be comfortable enough with the technology to use it efficiently, to use the search engines and to understand what is out there, what kinds of services are out there, and one of the things that you're addressed, Mr. Sabato, is trying to do get a level of education to our constituency so that they will vote and they will be active members of the political process. Well, part of that online is educating from the very beginning and I know Ms. Couric is very interested in education at levels, is educating our constituency not just in the issues but also getting them to the point where they can be effective Internet users, and also getting to them the tools with which to do this, and another portion that has not been addressed aside from this process is who is putting out this information and what are the checks on this information? For example, is there going to be any sort of support for independent sources of census data. In the library, we have a wonderful center, the Geostat Center, which holds all kinds of government data. Well, are we going to pour money into sustaining, creating, these resources and also marketing these resources to our constituency. Are we just going to let the candidates put up whatever slated version or non-slated version, depending on who the candidate is, I guess, of the statistics out there? There's a level of education and support, economic and otherwise--that needs to come into play and that's not something we've heard about.

Sabato: You've made an excellent point. I'm going to have request both panelists and questioners to be relatively brief because we're running out of time, but I want one answer to that question. I think Jeff may be able to provide it because there're actually are some sites out there that attempt to weigh and analyze the various claims made by the candidates on their Internet sites and in other fashions.

Nuechterlein: That's exactly right.

Sabato: You've worked with some of them.

Nuechterlein: There are these non-partisan Web sites that do sort of get to the heart of the matter and, in fact, I think if you're interested in getting on line and learning more about politics generally, I could recommend a couple. One is policy.com, politics on-line has a really excellent site and it basically has links to all sorts of articles on the issue that we've talking about and issues that we haven't had time to address. You mentioned the Freedom Channel earlier.Democracy.net. There're just a series of these which if you have the time, have the ability, to get on one are really useful for cutting through a lot of this.

Audience comment/san Miguel: The ability being part of the question here.

Sabato: Yes. There has to be that education first, but cloakroon.com as well is a very good one to use.

Sabato: You have to be quick. I'm getting signals that we've only got a couple of minutes left.

Nuechterlein: I just want to mention one related thing to what we've been talking about and that is that the Federal Election Commissions is wrestling with a lot of the issues that we're talking about and one of the issues that it recently was faced with is if a supporter of a candidate starts a web site and starts having links to other web sites, is that a political contribution to his or her candidate and the issue was, at least, tentatively resolved by the FEC that it's not a political contribution and that, for instance, Gore would not have to accept as a contribution the benefit from that web site, but it's still unclear whether or not the person that actually creates the web site has to register as a political action committee and these are the sorts of things that our government is going to be wrestling with for years to come.

Sabato: Yes, and the FEC is considering that at the moment. Let me try to get these three done if at all possible, with a brief question and a brief answer and we'll do our best.

Audience question/Jay Lasus: Hi. Jay Lasus, fourth year student in the--

Sabato: Campaigns and elections seminar.

Audience comment/Lasus: Yes. I just wondered if you could touch on briefly the relative effectiveness of e-mail in the campaigns. I know Jeff mentioned that briefly. I get e-mails from the Bill Bradley campaign frequently. Do people really read these? Do people really care or do they just say, oh, it's in my in box and delete? How effective do you think those are?

Nuechterlein: I think that they're really effective because you can target e-mail. I think I used the example of volunteers before, but you can target specific classes of voters so you could send-- Again, I think I mentioned environmental voters. You can send environmentally-specific messages to voters that you know share your view on that. It might make them more likely to get out and vote. One other thing I would mention along these lines is that web sites are much stickier than traditional forums of political participation. The average telephone call for a direct mail solicitation is less than a minute. The average television commercial, as you know, is about30 seconds. The average time spent on political web sites is about eight minutes, so we're talking about a very sticky interactive forum of communication.

Sabato: Good. Let me get this question from this gentleman.

Audience question/[Sharam]: My name is Jeff Sharam. I'm a first year here at the University and my question's relating to voter frustration. We mentioned a number of tricks that political candidates are trying to use on the Internet to direct people over to their sites. My question is for voters looking for actual information who keep on ending up at certain sites over and over again, does this contribute to voter frustration and could that frustration ultimately lead to apathy?

Sabato: Very good question. Excellent. See, even our first-year students are terrific. Amazing. Who wants to answer that?

Eischeid: I'd like to point out that there are other places that voters can look. Newspaper websites are a really good resource for any kind of issue on that and you can also search the archives. Depending on the function, you can go back 14 days a month, so I think there's enough people out there that know these resources are there, so if they start to get frustrated with political sites or anything like that, they can always turn to news.

Sabato: And there's some terrific news sites. The one person who couldn't make it today was Mark Stencel and he's ill and it's not his fault. Terrific kid. Former student. Was an officer at your former competition, the University Journal, and this young man is now the politics editor for Washington Post.com which has been named the best Internet news site, of course, except for the Cavalier Daily, in the world and it is terrific and I'm so proud of him and what he's done and there's a good example of what John was suggesting. Some of you may think the Post is based, and yeah, you're right, but the on politics site on Washington Post.com is terrific and Mark Stencel would welcome your comments at any time. I urge you to make that apart of your day. You can learn a lot very quickly on Washington Post.com, the politics section. Thank you for your excellent question, and young lady, you will finish up our panel and we appreciate that.

Audience question/Christy Thomas: Thank you for taking my question. My name is Christy Thomas. I'm a third year in the College of Arts and Sciences. I'm an English major and a government minor. Right now I'm doing research on censorship in the media and I'd like to address this to you, Mr. Sabato and to Mr. Robertson, because I'm aware that you have a site that deals with family sites and I wanted to know briefly what you might think is the role of the government in censorship on the Internet?

Robertson: Well, it's a very complex issue as you know. There currently is a bill that's before the Congress for the On-line Child Safety Protection Act. It will probably pass but it will probably also then be registered as unconstitutional. I have kind of two different issues. As a father, I think somebody ought to do something about this stuff because when you go on these search queries and you're looking for, if you're a little kid and you're want to find out about Bambi and the next thing you know you find out Bambi's not a little deer running around the forest. It's revolting as a parent and you just want to do something about this and the first thing is shouldn't government do something about this.

As a business man, however, who's trying to solve the problem with a private sector solution, I think, well, let the government just do nothing because then they'll buy my product, so it's somewhat cynical. I would hope we could do both. What we're attempting to do is create a product that is optional--I want to say this so people that ask me, aren't you trying to censor and you're going to legislate morality. The answer is no. We're not going to legislate anything. You don't have to buy my product. You can get on line a lot of places. You can get net. zero the defenders of the free world, for goodness sake, whatever that is, but what we're attempting to do is create a product that filters the web at the server level which means that a cable 12-year-oldcan't defeat it. The products that you can buy off the shelf, you insert in your PC, a capable 12-year-old can defeat it and so that as you query the web for different search materials, if some of these inappropriate Bambi sites show up, they're blocked.

Similarly, we've got a unique technology that also prevents the spamer from sending the inappropriate e-mail which I will guess probably the majority of the folks in this room have been asked if they're looking for any form of things from massages to whatever else is available online and you just have to get rid of it and I think it's reprehensible that our children are being targeted with this kind of stuff, so we're trying to fix that, but there's a huge problem. I think that one of the problems that we do have in this country is that despite the first amendment which is clearly has to override all these issues, there are obscenity laws on the books which are simply just not being enforced and I think if we were to begin to look at better enforcement of current obscenity laws that are on the books in different communities, we could begin to eliminate some of this stuff.

Sabato: And on that in a sense very exciting note, we can end this panel which has ranged widely. I want to thank you, the audience. You've been a terrific audience and a highly participatory audience and I think you'll agree with me that it's awfully easy to be a moderator when you have members of a panel as knowledgeable and able as these. Please give them around of applause [applause].

Thank you all for coming.