Britons' letters to voters not well-received in Ohio
LONDON -- A British newspaper that set off a trans-Atlantic political storm when it urged its readers to write to Ohio voters in an attempt to sway their ballot choice in the US presidential race said yesterday that it had ended the campaign.
The Guardian newspaper said that it stopped giving out names and addresses of undecided voters after hackers broke into its website a week ago, effectively ending ''Operation Clark County."
Editors also said they were overwhelmed with the response to the campaign -- a response that included Guardian reporters being deluged with thousands of angry e-mails from Americans.
The newspaper also has abandoned plans to take four of the best letter-writers to Springfield, Ohio, to meet voters. Instead it will send the winners to the ''more tranquil" Washington, D.C., for a vacation.
The Guardian had invited its readers to contact voters in Clark County, Ohio, a swing state, about the importance of the Nov. 2 election.
The newspaper's website said letter writers were free to support either President Bush or Senator John F. Kerry, but noted that a Guardian poll of Britons indicated 47 percent backed Kerry and 16 percent supported Bush.
Within the first day, more than 3,000 readers logged on to the newspaper's website to obtain the name and address of an unaffiliated voter taken from the electoral roll. The campaign became a worldwide story, and website readers from several countries, including Australia, Japan, Canada, Morocco, Chile, France, and Italy, applied for addresses.
A spokesman for the newspaper said yesterday that the project went well, with more than 14,000 addresses downloaded, when the site was hacked into last weekend ''presumably by someone unhappy with the debate we had created."
While the newspaper called its project a success, it created a headache for journalists at The Guardian, where media editor Ian Katz reported they received thousands of e-mails from angry US voters, many of them staunch conservatives.
''Hey England, Scotland and Wales, mind your own business," one American wrote in a letter published on the newspaper's website. ''We don't need weenie-spined Limeys meddling in our presidential election."
