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            Women Get the Online Vote

            
However shaky its methodology, online polling is already a reality. Online
voting, too, is being debated in a variety of communities.

            Now,
one Internet company has announced that it will hold an online primary--among a
group of voters bigger than the population of California and New York combined:
women.

            During
the week of March 1, 2000, a new Web site called "Majority 2000: Women Count"
plans to hold a nationwide primary, designed to gauge the way women will vote
in the Super Tuesday primary March 14. Calling itself a "political women's
portal for presidential politics," the site is a joint project between Good
Housekeeping and Women.com, the New York-based community site. (They became
corporate siblings when Women.com merged with Hearst, Good
Housekeeping 's publisher, in January of this year.) The virtual primary
will be the culmination of several months of online surveys designed both to
provide information about which political issues are important to women and to
determine how women are likely to vote.

            
Explaining the rationale for the new site, Lisa Stone, programming director for
Women.com, says, "It's an underreported fact that women have been the voting
majority since 1964." In the 1996 race, President Clinton was re-elected
largely because of the 11-point gender split in his favor among women voters.
"In the same year that women are poised to take over the Net, we'll also choose
who our next president will be," Stone adds.

            The
Majority 2000 site, which plans to launch next January, is part of a growing
trend of powerful voting blocs using the Internet to flex their political
muscles. Earlier this month, the AFL-CIO announced that it was partnering with
the Massachusetts-based company iBelong to produce a Web service called Workingfamilies.com.
Scheduled to launch Dec. 1, Workingfamilies.com will offer all the features of
a traditional Internet service provider, plus added facilities to make it easy
for members to contact elected officials and corporations. Other efforts
include Rock the Vote, aimed at young voters, and Starmedia's
soon-to-be-launched Voto 2000, which targets the Latino community.

            In
August, Oxygen Media announced that it had received $4.5 million from the
Markle Foundation to form Oxygen-Markle Plus, a publicly accessible
market-research firm designed to measure and reflect women's opinions on a
variety of subjects from consumer tastes to public affairs. That project uses
the politically connected polling firm of Penn-Schoen & Berland, which has
counted Bill Clinton among its clients. For its part, the Good
Housekeeping -Women.com project is retaining Harris Interactive, one of the
premier online polling firms.

            Of
course, the political impact of such Net initiatives has yet to be proved. But
executives at Good Housekeeping and Women.com say that Elizabeth Dole's
withdrawal last week from the 2000 presidential primary convinced them that
such a project was necessary. More than 1,800 women responded to an online
survey about Dole's candidacy, and many wrote heartfelt responses. Marqueta
Bentley, of Oklahoma City, for example, wrote, "I was sad when I heard that
Mrs. Dole had pulled from the 2000 Presidential Race. I and many of my friends
think that Mrs. Dole has impeccable credentials and would have been a very
knowledgeable president. I hope that Mr. Bush will choose Mrs. Dole as his
running mate. We are ready to put Mrs. Dole to work in the White House. She has
paid her dues politically and proved to be an asset in any position she has
held."

            "We believe that this is
one of the instruments that can help give women the sense that their vote
really matters," says Ellen Levine, Good Housekeeping 's editor in
chief.