More Political Campaigns Play Games with Websites

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Perhaps taking the lead from Connecticut Republicans who set up fake Twitter accounts and websites for their Democratic opponents, other political campaigns are doing it, too.

In California, an intern for the campaign of Beth Krom for Congress noticed that the website of incumbent Representative John Campbell had a misspelled link: CampbellforCongres.com, with a missing s. "Krom's supporters bought the misspelled domain name and redirected it to Krom's website," explained NBC News.

Moreover, the link was unnoticed from mid-November until just the other day, when the OC Register's blog pointed it out.

On the other hand, Republican Rita Meyer, candidate for Governor in Wyoming, cut ties with a volunteer staffer who had performed a similar trick, according to the Associated Press. Opponent Matt Mead had the website meadforgovernor.com, and Meyer staffer Paul Montoya reportedly registered the URL mattmeadforgovernor.com and redirected it to Meyer's site.

According to the AP, Mead learned about it from supporters and confronted Meyer, who said she didn't know about it and wouldn't have done it because it would reflect badly on her campaign. The site was switched back to the legitimate Mead site on Wednesday.

Montoya, for his part, reportedly claimed it was meant to demonstrate the importance of securing pertinent domain names.

InsightsDigital 57 Posting Virtuoso

In politics, anything will be used and using social networking is no exception.

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