hen Harvard junior Harpaul Alberto Kohli first heard about possible voting irregularities in Palm Beach, the morning after Election Day, his reaction was almost automatic. ''I started e-mailing a lot of my friends,'' he recalled. ''Actually not a lot, maybe 35 or so.''
Kohli had a few ideas: maybe a protest, maybe the circulation of a detailed analysis of the Florida election statutes that a friend of his had done. As his thoughts began to gel, his e-mail list grew: within 24 hours, he was corresponding with 130 people; by Friday morning, 48 hours after he sent his first e-mail, his network had grown to 210.
Soon Kohli, a native of Washington, D.C., found a Web site that was coordinating protests in cities all over the country. He also began contributing to a few e-mail discussion lists. He signed two or three online petitions. By Friday night, he was helping to coordinate a protest on the steps of Boston's State House that drew about 100 people. In one five-hour stretch on Friday night, Kohli received 470 e-mails.
The pace hasn't slackened since. Yesterday, a sleep-deprived Kohli was still frantically e-mailing sympathetic activists, planning a follow-up protest for this Saturday. At the same time he was dealing with ''spam'' from e-mail activists on the other side of the issue, and fighting off malicious attempts by opponents to knock him off pro-''re-vote'' e-mail lists.
''The vote-related activity on the Net is really fast and furious now,'' he said. ''In fact, it's all-out chaos.''
Political chaos is certainly not unique this post-election season, but Kohli's experience shows that the commotion now extends to an entirely new front: e-mail and Internet activism. A number of Web sites now make it very easy for activists to create e-mail campaigns quickly and Web petitions for little or no money. And many of these sites are optimized for quick-starts on late-breaking issues, making them ideal for instant controversies like the impeachment of a president, the deportation of Elian Gonzales, or a contested presidential election.
The wide circulation of ''media lists,'' with personal e-mail addresses of prominent newspaper editors and television news directors, has extended the edges of the revolution directly into the media's e-mail in-boxes.
Michael Cooke, editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, has watched the number of e-mails he receives ''balloon'' since shortly after Election Day. On Monday, he received about 1,450 e-mails, most of them urging him to oppose any ''re-votes'' in Florida. At least that's what Cooke said, based on some sampling.
''Basically, I just delete them,'' he said. ''I scroll through the list looking for my boss's name. If I don't see his name in the `from' box, I don't even look at it.
''This is the first time I've been spammed like this, and it's annoying. Now instead of going out to lunch, I just sit there deleting e-mails.''
The Globe's editor, Matthew V. Storin, reports a similar deluge. Between Friday afternoon and Monday evening, he received 2,193 e-mails, the vast majority related to the voting in Florida. Later, he gave un update: Between 11 p.m. Monday and 10:40 a.m. yesterday he received 310 e-mails, he said.
Who is sending these e-mails? People like Jim Noteman, who works at a technology start-up in Chicago. On Monday, Noteman received an ''Open Letter to Palm Beach County Voters'' from his sister, who had received it earlier from a co-worker. The letter reflected Noteman's views, so that night he added his own thoughts and sent it on to a list of media contacts that had been circulating among a group of Republican activists in Illinois.
Does it bother Noteman to think that his e-mail was probably deleted without being read?
''Not really,'' he replied. ''I had some views and I did something about it. I feel good about that.''
Although Noteman's activism does not seem likely to make much of a difference, some observers are not willing to count it out entirely.
''The news media and politicians are definitely getting increasingly savvy about separating the wheat from the chaff,'' said Paul Watanabe, a professor in the department of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. ''Still, it's very hard to argue with the multiplier effect: where one message to a friend can end up getting distributed to thousands of people at no cost.''
The major political parties deny that they coordinate or sponsor Internet activism to any significant degree. Certainly none of them encourage e-mail campaigns on their official Web sites. Yet, even without any formal support, political initiatives will probably continue to be disseminated over the Internet, if only because the tools to create Internet campaigns are widely distributed, easy to use, and free.
Political activists have been quick to take advantage of free Internet ''community'' sites. For example, EGroups, an e-mail list-management site, allows anyone to set up an e-mail distribution list quickly and for free. Home-page hosting sites such as GeoCities allow activists to set up Web-based information pages on the Internet. Petition sites, such as E The People, SpeakOut, and PetitionOnline allow activists to set up online petitions that can aggregate ''signers,'' and forward the results to campaigns and the media. The result is an always-available, instant information network for activists like Harpaul Alberto Kohli.
