Hi Declan. Er, yes, the state probably appears to be claiming that. The statute has a McIntyre-derived exception for people who spend less than $300 and act as lone gunm...pampleteers. This is an intentional misreading of McIntyre as applying only to little old ladies in tennis shoes. Instead, the ohio statute, including the part applying to candidates, was found facially invalid. See Griset, 1999, and/or Stewart v Taylor (http://communities.msn.com/robbinstewart under cases.) Chandler v Georgia established that candidates for public office don't waive the rights they have as citizens, to be free from warrantless piss-testing (in that case) or from being threatened with jail for using a hotmail account (in this one.) Unfortunately, in McIntyre the court used the term "narrowly tailored", so election authorities, acting in bad faith, have been inserting exceptions (the little old lady exception, the skywriting exception, the vote for smith exception, etc.) and then claiming their version is more narrowly tailored, and thus distinguishable. This becomes an annual event, so my job becomes sissiph....becomes frustrating. On the one hand, I have full employment for life, on the other the conspiracy to benevolently censor online election speech is able to continue its progrom even while losing most of the cases. I have found very little in the way of support from the online community as to using these election cases for establishing a general principle that online speech is protected by state and federal free speech clauses. Instead, most of the case law on our side has come from the ACLU's "indecency" cases. I've been banging my head against a wall on this theme for about three years now, but I'm reaching a point where I'll need some kind of institutional support or will have to go back to having a day job and just do this as a hobby. My bottleneck is that I don't know how to line up cocounsel in the 30-some states that need to be sued over this. Cordially, robbin

From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Interesting. BTW the state appears to be claiming that they took care of the _McIntyre_ problems by rewriting the statute post-decision to only apply to pseudonymous/anonymous messages written by someone affiliated with a campaign.

So in other words, you could write stuff under a nym, but someone on the campaign staff could not.

(Note I'm not saying this makes the statute constitutional, but that it's not as broad as it could be.) -Declan At 05:15 PM 6/18/01 +0000, robbin stewart wrote:

...

Matt, Declan, thanks for bringing this to my attention. It's worse than it looks at first. The prosecutor isn't claiming the content of the message was untrue, but that using a "katie" psuedonym was the falsity making the messages criminal. (snip)

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