Magyarul (in Hungarian)

Election Campaign Archive

See also: Background paper by Andras Mink,   historian and editor Selected messages: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

Between the two rounds of the 2002 parliamentary elections in Hungary, the Open Society Archives made a public announcement about setting up an archive of electronic campaign letters, inviting all recipients of e-mails and cell phone text messages related to the parliamentary elections to forward the messages to a specified e-mail account or cell phone number. A large number of people responded with forwarding messages supporting, criticizing, accusing or parodying the parties and candidates standing for election, along with messages that called for election rallies, thus contributing to a collection that, on the one hand, represents a peculiar field of application of new information and communication technologies, and, on the other hand, provides a unique snapshot of a post-communist country's election campaign.

In view of the fact that the messages were written in Hungarian, the database and the webpage of the archive of electronic campaign letters are also in Hungarian. For the benefit of those who are interested in the material but do not speak Hungarian, we offer in English translation a selection of the most typical messages, along with a summary providing background information on the election and the people taking part.

Since the text of any electronic letter is all too easily altered, we cannot guarantee the genuineness and the unadulterated state of the messages received. However, the aim of the collection is not to prove their authenticity but to give researchers an overview of the role e-mails and text messages have played in the election campaign.

The processing of the messages

From the archivers' viewpoint, only the content of the messages has been of interest, not the identity of senders and recipients. Therefore, we deleted the names and addresses of senders and recipients alike in the case of e-mails (but not the senders of e-mails originating from political parties, government organizations or agencies obviously engaged in mass propaganda), and the phone numbers in the case of text messages. We archive the messages in an anonymized form, before making them available to the public on our Hungarian webpage.

The publication of our webpage has concluded the first phase of processing the archive of electronic campaign letters. At the moment we are improving our database system, as a result of which it is already possible to do text searches on the messages over the Internet. We shall keep the public informed about the further processing of the collection via our homepage.

Lending assistance in methodology

We firmly believe that the electronic messages form the unique and incomparable documents of campaign periods and that their preservation is indispensable to the authentic documentation of the history of modern elections. We would be pleased to give technical and methodological advice to other archives, primarily those residing in the region, which are capable of receiving, processing and archiving such messages. 

Ivan Szekely, June 2002