BELTON – It was born as an epiphany to reach voters in a new and inexpensive way that used the latest technology to educate them about an up and coming political candidate. The idea was new and revolutionary and had the potential to bring the candidate out of obscurity.

The man and his friend approached the technology with caution, but their actions eventually unlocked a whirlwind that stopped them from ever progressing past the testing stage. In fact, the backlash from the online community was so stiff that the incident actually helped shape part of the 1998 Texas GOP party platform.

What at first appeared to be a good idea died an example that sometimes being on the cutting edge can be bewildering and downright painful.

This is the story about a respected local attorney, the first assistant district attorney in Bell County, and how he became known as a spammer. His name is Murff Bledsoe and he approved this message.

Actually, Bledsoe didn’t approve anything about this article and was somewhat reluctant to share his experience in what was his first, and he says last, political race.

“It was 10 years ago,” he said.

Ten years ago spam was just emerging as a hot issue. Spammers were filling up inboxes with all kinds of messages and netizens were beginning to lash back. Today anti-spam software blocks much of the spam traffic before it reaches e-mail inboxes. In 1998, spam blocking software was just not very good.

“At the time I was oblivious about the debate about spam in the online world. I learned about it real quick,” Bledsoe said. “Now that I have been an online consumer for years, I’m irritated by spam, but I’m not as strident about it as some people.”

Bledsoe’s crash course about how fed up people had become with spam started at 4 a.m. the morning after he and David Eakin, another assistant district attorney in Bell County, sent out a test batch of political messages to 2,000 e-mail addresses. Bledsoe was awakened at home to the sound of his fax machine receiving a message. It was from an irate man in California, who had received a political announcement for a race in Texas.

In 1998, Bledsoe was among eight attorneys hoping to be elected to a single justice post on the Criminal Court of Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state.

He knew going in that his work was cut out for him. He was up against attorneys from much larger counties with larger voting bases. But the Criminal Court of Appeals is always a crapshoot, so he felt he had a chance.

Bledose said the court of appeals is the “most glaring example of putting people on the bench where people are not informed about the candidates they are voting for.”

It is a position where candidates traditionally are have little visibility and raise only small amounts of money. In 1998, no candidate raised more than $30,000 for his or her campaign, which is less than what is needed to run for the district bench in Bell County.

Lawyers sometimes struggle to know the candidates in these races, let alone much of the public who has little contact with the criminal justice system.

In the end, it can become a name game where the candidates from large metropolitan areas, or people with the most common names, are elected.

For Bledsoe, who ended up coming in fourth place, the most enjoyable part of his candidacy was traveling around to the editorial boards of newspapers around the state where he answered questions in an effort to gain endorsements.

He said the Houston Chronicle endorsed him, as did newspapers in Laredo and Beaumont. Unfortunately for him, voters don’t usually carry newspaper endorsements with them to the voting booth.

With little cash to spend Bledsoe zeroed in on the opportunity to send out his bio to voters via the Internet.

“I was completely unaware of what we were about to tap into,” he said.

Bledsoe has had 10 years to ponder about being labeled as a spammer. His story was shared nationwide and was an arrow in the quiver of anti-spammers, but he insists today that the spam debate took over the real story, which he said is the political use of technology.

“True spammers cover their tracks,” Bledsoe said. “We didn’t think of it as spam. It was an electronic political message. We found out that people are more guarded and get angrier about unsolicited e-mail compared to unsolicited direct mail.”

To get his message out to the masses, Bledsoe turned to Eakin, whom he credits with helping the Bell County District Attorney’s Office make the transition into the information age.

Eakin and Bledsoe contacted an internet service provider to work with and began compiling e-mail addresses. They estimate they had up to 20,000 with more to come.

For about $50 they purchased spamming software and Eakin installed it on his home computer.

“It was fairly prolific at the time,” Eakin said about the availability of the software.

Bledsoe prepared a full page political flyer with all his pertinent campaign information.

They didn’t really suspect anything was wrong with the list that they received. It was presented to them as a list of Texas e-mail addresses.

“People selling lists at the time were more interested in making money than in having clean lists,” Eakin said. “The fine tuning of the list, it just wasn’t there.”

It was just a test batch, a fraction of the names they had acquired. At first all seemed to go well, but then came the phone calls, faxes and e-mails.

“It was kind of like putting your toe in the water and it was scalding hot,” Bledsoe said.

Bledsoe said he took calls from people who screamed at him and hung up on him. Eakin got so many e-mails filled with vitriol that he eventually had to close his email account.

He was powerless to respond to the backlash.

“The way the service provider set it up, I couldn’t reply,” Eakin said.

Rather than inform people about Bledsoe the candidate, the message served to unite the growing and increasingly vocal population of anti-spammers. Bledsoe and Eakin were brought up in chat rooms and their messages may have been forwarded to anti-spammers all over the country. Wired, one of the top technology magazines in the nation, did a story.

“We did a very small test – and it’s a good thing we did,” Bledsoe said.

It’s still unclear whether the controversy helped or hurt Bledsoe politically. Some people think in a race like the Criminal Court of Appeals any name recognition is good.

Bledsoe says his days as a politician are gone, but not necessarily because of a failed strategy or anything like that.

“We thought we had a good idea, a good concept,” he said. “I wouldn’t change that. We were just unable to do what we wanted to do. People are still voting blind in that race.”