Elections soon: parties spam the inbox
20th August 2007
Out of roughly 100 spam messages, accumulated in the one of webmaster@-type mailboxes, there were two about the forthcoming parliamentary elections in Ukraine. Both seemed to have originated from the same political party: they have links back to their website, and also their contact emails. One had apologies inside, saying “We don’t use the money of others, thus we had to contact you the way we did” (approx. translation from Ukrainian).
I do not yet know (and might never know for sure, actually), if this is a true spam-campaign, or a “black PR”. Though “black PR” scenario seems highly unlikely – the party didn’t get into the parliament during two previous parliamentary elections, and has a negligible expected electorate percent (I’d say below 0.2%).
If it’s not “black PR”, then we’re seeing a new trend leading us to the truly “electronic government”.
We now only need some web-resource to become sufficiently popular and conduct law-enforced elections on-line – of course, with IP blocking to disallow repeated voting, and other pseudo-secure whistles 
I wonder if other countries have the experience of true (non-fake, non-black-PR) political unsolicited bulk mailings.
Anybody? Examples, study references?
