Political parties are using the Web more aggressively to reach voters and gather personal information such as e-mail during this election season, an indication of the Internet's growing importance on the campaign scene.

A new study by political consultants praised the major political parties for their continuing embracement of the Web as a vehicle for getting their message out. The report examined how official sites of the parties are communicating, fund raising and organizing this campaign season. Campaigns are finding that the Internet provides a more efficient tool to narrowly target voters than television, and the Web can make fund-raising efforts cheaper and easier.

However, the study criticized the parties' sites overall for several shortcomings, including not providing search features, being difficult to navigate, and failing to keep their sites fresh. Furthermore, polical parties and especially their key-figures are very prone to criticism, which may result in libel and slander. People can start boycot sites or publish slander about a minister in newsgroups. This can be very damaging to his person and the political party he represents.

Also, websites can be published under a domain name similar to the name of one of these key-figures, showing demeaning pictures and texts. This was the case in Holland where one person had registered www. janpeterbalkenende.com, the same as the prime ministers name.

Pretection can help fight and prevent such actions. Pretection can do a full domain name scan, analysing which domain names should be registered and which are very likely to be abused. The Online Monitoring Service can provide information on all sites offering illegal content, such as slander on a political party or person. Pretection will continiously monitor the Internet for these infringements preventing any serious harm to the image of a party or it's key-figures.

Especially now Internet voting is becoming an issue, boycott campaigns on the Internet could be very harmfull to political parties. Even voting scams aren't out of the question. Pretection could monitor the Internet vigourisly during the election periods to see if no intentional harm is done to a campaign, safeguarding the voting procedures and images of the candidates