Ashdown's site open to suggestions

Imagine a candidate for major office allowing just anyone to help him draft his campaign stands?

Utah has such a candidate: Democratic U.S. Senate challenger Pete Ashdown, who hopes to unseat longtime Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, come November.

"I think only one other candidate — a Libertarian in Maryland running for the U.S. Senate — has a collaborative wiki site" on the issues, says Ashdown, a Web guru through his Utah-based XMission Internet access business.

But while at first blush having an Internet interactive issues forum may sound good, it can also cause problems.

Someone could see it as an opportunity to put vile, racist or even threatening material on the site, such as the person who posted on Ashdown's site that "coloreds" should have more elective abortions.

Even if offensive, Ashdown believes, such free speech should still reign.

Ashdown, a tech-savvy candidate who is at the forefront of Internet campaigning, says the benefits outweigh the problems on his interactive wiki "town hall meeting." Some "jerks" may write absurd opinions, but overall a good online debate takes place, Ashdown maintains.

"My site was actually attacked in January," with some obscene material, even pictures, placed on his wiki site. "We're blocking those people from coming back" and posting more junk, he says.

At Ashdown's campaign Web site — vote.peteashdown.org/ — there is a page designated as "collaboration wiki," where anyone can read where Ashdown now stands on 47 different issues. You can then rewrite some of those stands, putting in your own two cents' worth. So far the wiki site has had more than 35,000 hits, Ashdown says, although only several hundred bothered to write in.

Some issues are more volatile than others. Ashdown's abortion issue has seen 33 rewrites over the six months the site has been up; his immigration issue 21 rewrites. But his corporate reform issue has only one rewrite.

The wiki site "is very valuable, in the sense that I want to collaborate with everyone. Governing should not be 'us' versus 'them.' We should all participate. The best solutions are not partisan. The best solutions should rise to the top," Ashdown says.

After a new rewrite is submitted, Ashdown himself or one of his top campaign aides will review it. And then they will either ignore the suggestions or incorporate them in some fashion into the "officially rewritten" issues stand.