Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times

Think the campaign’s nasty in English? Try it en Espanol. For the first time, both presidential campaigns are engaged in a brutal, almost completely negative war in Spanish-language commercials, all but overwhelming their other messages to Spanish-speaking voters.

“It’s much more harsh. Usually Spanish-language advertising is very sort of softball, inclusive, apple pie kinds of messages,” said Louis DeSipio, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. “This is the first year I can think of national commercials coming from both parties, Spanish-language ads taking a harsh message. And it’s come early.”

For the exploding Hispanic population, graduating to negative advertising is another political coming of age. But it also serves as a reminder that there are two different campaigns going on - one for the English-language audience and another, with a different emphasis, for voters who speak predominantly Spanish, and playing out in both Spanish-language news coverage and ads.

English-language voters receive a steady dose on newscasts and in ads of William Ayers and Charles H. Keating Jr., horse-race coverage of who’s up and who’s down, and a back and forth over who is more “dishonorable.”

Spanish-language audiences, though, have seen Mr. McCain attack Mr. Obama on immigration and Latin American issues, including his willingness to meet with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Mr. Obama responded with ads trying to tie Mr. McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration and blasting the Republican for the being unprepared on the economy.

A decade ago the few Spanish-language ads run were clunky translations of English ads. Political pros quickly realized that didn’t connect. But for years the pros concluded Spanish-language negative ads still didn’t work. That began to change in the 2004 presidential campaign when the Bush-Cheney campaign, along with the positive ads, mixed in ads on abortion and gay marriage to attack Sen. John Kerry.

“There was a dramatic evolution and it took the Republican strategists from 2000, when they almost exclusively aired positive ads, to 2004, when I’d say virtually the same exact strategists decided that the Hispanic electorate was ready for intensely negative advertising,” said Adam J. Segal of Johns Hopkins University’s Hispanic Voter Project.

The campaigns started out positive this year, but turned nasty after Mr. McCain fired off a commercial this summer arguing Mr. Obama tried to sink the Senate’s immigration bill - a charge that’s been debunked by myriad fact checkers.

Mr. Obama responded with a commercial linking Mr. McCain, a longtime supporter of Hispanic causes and of citizenship for illegal immigrants, to Rush Limbaugh, a talk show host who harshly criticized amnesty and who Hispanic rights groups say has injected hate into the immigration debate. When Mr. McCain ran a second ad on the subject, Mr. Obama fired back with a commercial arguing Mr. McCain “wants to hide the fact that he’s the one who turned his back on us.”

Both of them are playing loose with the truth, said Maria Elena Salinas, co-anchor of Noticiero Univision, the Spanish-language network’s nightly newscast, who is also a columnist.

“They’re both misleading. Both Barack Obama and John McCain have put out immigration ads that are misleading and mischaracterizing,” she said, adding that both did advocate for last year’s immigration bill but both also voted to build 700 miles of fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border - a vote that for many Hispanics symbolizes the negative tone of the immigration debate.

Mrs. Salina said Hispanics have a chance this year to prove they can be difference-makers. Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, all states that went Republican in 2004, are considered at the top of the battleground this year, each has a sizable Hispanic population and many of the newly registered voters in those states are Hispanic.

“People are very motivated and we have to remember one of the reasons the campaigns are going after the Latino vote is a lot of these new naturalized citizens don’t have a committed party,” she said. “They are both trying, and I dont know that either one of them is actually succeeding, even though it is very clear Latinos are very motivated to vote.”

The campaigns said they are pursuing those voters, and that means conveying specific messages just as they would with other identifiable demographics.

“We try to target audiences, of course, and make sure Hispanics in Florida and other regions know what they’re voting for,” said Hessy Fernandez, spokeswoman Hispanic media for Mr. McCain’s campaign. “They need to know Barack Obama has never been in Latin America, they need to know he wants to sit down with dictators, Chavez, Castro.”

The Obama camp blamed Mr. McCain for introducing the negative Spanish ads.

“We’re responding hard with the truth. They’re going to resort to lies and distortions,” said Federico de Jesus, a spokesman for the campaign who said the negative ads show Mr. McCain “has a Hispanic problem” among voters.

Polls of Hispanic voters show Mr. Obama leading Mr. McCain by as much as 30 percentage points.

The voters themselves are left to sort out the charges and countercharges, but Spanish-speaking voters are hindered by the dearth of news voices available to them.

Federico Subervi, professor at Texas State University and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Media & Markets, said unless a Spanish-speaking voter lives in Miami, New York, Los Angeles or a handful of other major cities, it’s unlilkely they can get a Spanish-language newspaper delivered. And he said Spanish radio is devoid of most political talk outside of a few major markets, such as New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.

“But leave those cities, and unless you live in california and have access to Radio Bilingue … you don’t get political news on a regular basis,” he said.

That leaves the national Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Univision as the main sources for political news - and gives Spanish-language ads enormous power to control the debate.

Both campaigns have been accessible to Spanish-language press, with Univision’s Sunday political talk show Al Punto airing yet another McCain interview last weekend. The topics were Mr. McCain’s attacks on Mr. Obama, military action in Venezuela - the candidate ruled that out, saying, “I don’t think it’s necessary” - and immigration and Hispanic outreach.

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Originally Published at CNN

As the U.S. presidential elections draw closer, voting activists are bracing themselves for an onslaught of online dirty tricks and misinformation campaigns designed to deceive and disenfranchise voters.

Political dirty tricks and misinformation close to election time are, of course, nothing new. But experts say they are about to get nastier and more prevalent because of the ease of disseminating them online.

They cite young people, who are more likely to seek out information online, as being particularly vulnerable to these attacks.

Low-income and minority voters have been vulnerable in the past to nefarious tactics used to prevent them from exercising their right to vote.

This was a common feature of the 2006 election, when 14,000 Latino voters in Orange County, California, received letters telling them it was illegal for immigrants to vote.

Lillie Coney, associate director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told of a variety of online tactics that are being used by would-be election saboteurs, determined to skew election results in their party’s favor.

“We’re seeing all sorts of ways in which these people can put out the message to first-time voters and those who are unsure of their voting rights. They are replacing the tactics we saw in previous election cycles,” she said.

In the past, political gamesmanship relied on traditional methods like telephone calls, direct mail and leafleting.

During the U.S. 2004 and 2006 elections, flyers were distributed that falsely claimed that voters could be disqualified from voting in elections if they had parking violations, late rent or even outstanding child support payments.

Tough action has since been taken in the United States with the introduction of a Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, which makes it a federal crime to “knowingly provide false information with the intent to disenfranchise another person in a federal election.” Violators face up to five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000.

But tricksters have moved online because of the low probability of being caught, and also because anti-spam laws and “no-call” lists exempt political messages.

The timing of misinformation efforts is vital as the bad information needs to be sent relatively close to election day, with enough time to reach voters but not enough for opponents to employ countermeasures.

One of the most popular deceptive campaign methods is using Voice Over IP calls or “robocalls,” Coney said.

These are popular because the calls don’t come from a central location, so tracing the perpetrator is much harder. The number of calls that can be made is practically limitless.

What’s more, Internet phone calls are not regulated, making it relatively easy for someone to misinform a huge number of people.

For example, during the primary season, anonymous robocalls were made during North Carolina that were designed to give voters the false impression that they were not already registered to vote.

Many of the voters who received those calls were black.

Voters in 11 states complained about similarly deceptive calls suggesting that they were linked to a national strategy of voter deception.

The speed of online communications allows scammers to be precise in reaching their targets, especially by taking advantage of existing Internet scams, like phishing and pharming.

Phishing typically involves fraudulent bulk e-mail messages that guide recipients to legitimate-looking but fake Web sites and try to get them to supply personal information.

Pharming secretly redirects traffic from a Web site to a different site altogether, even though the browser seems to be displaying the Web address that Internet users wanted to visit.

A hacker was able to redirect visitors to Barack Obama’s Community Blogs site to Hillary Clinton’s Web site in April by using similar methods.

“By early November, we’re expecting spam emails to be sent giving the wrong location for a polling station, or, incorrect details about who has the right to vote,” Coney said.

“There’s even a Web site that’s offering to register voters for $9.95. Of course, it doesn’t cost anything to vote,” Coney added.

Certainly, most Internet users are savvy about phishing emails and don’t necessarily fall for them, but it is the mass reach that has activists like Coney worried.

In a tight race where every voter counts, the implications are serious.

Another weapon in the arsenal of online political scammers is “typo squatting,” where people not connected to campaigns buy rights to a candidate’s Internet address, with their name misspelled, using them to steal and potentially misinform supporters.

These people are virtually impossible to trace, especially if they use sites like DomainsByProxy, which specialize in maintaining the anonymity of Web site owners.

Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec’s security response unit, said his company found that 47 out of 160 variations on www.barackobama.com were being “typo-squatted.”

“You can guarantee that more of these will become common in future elections,” Friedrichs said.

However, in the same way that saboteurs are using the Internet to spread misinformation and create voter confusion, there are numerous examples that highlight the positive ways the Internet is being used as a great democratic tool.

The Obama campaign has certainly exploited Internet social networking tools to the full. His success in primaries and caucuses across the country, as well as in raising unprecedented amounts of money through small donations, can be traced back to the Internet.

A group of University of Washington students has created a Facebook application called Your Revolution, where anyone with a Facebook account can join the cause and register to vote.

The application takes advantage of Washington and Arizona’s new online voter registration legislation.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, argues that online voter-generated activism has become a full-fledged political force and one that can no longer be ignored.

“It’s really rebalancing the power, not into the hands of the special interests and those with money but into the hands of citizens who actually now can organize themselves,” he said.

“Let me just add that organized minorities are always more powerful than disorganized majorities.”

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