By Jeremy Herb 

The Web site MeetChrisDonovan.com looks legitimate enough. The main picture shows Connecticut Speaker of the House Christopher Donovan pictured with a smiling Barack Obama. Then you read the main headline, "Mortgaging Connecticut's Future," which says it's "just plain wrong" that Donovan and the Democrats borrowed $2.3 billion. Scroll down further and there is a post titled "Going Back to the Well," describing Donovan's "refusal to cut the state's outrageous spending." Another is headlined "Costing Meriden Jobs." These aren't the messages the speaker wants to tell his constituents, but this site comes up ahead of Donovan's official one when you search "Chris Donovan" on Google.

MeetChrisDonovan.com was created by the Connecticut Republican Party, one of 33 fake Web sites and Twitter accounts the GOP started for state Democrats. After Democrats protested, Twitter shut down the accounts because Republicans were impersonating the lawmakers. But State GOP Chairman Chris Healy says he has no intention of stopping the Web sites, and he has no legal reason to do so. "By complaining to Twitter, almost weeping in public, it's helped drive more traffic to the Web sites," Healy says. The GOP may even create fake sites for more Democratic lawmakers, who hold a 114–37 advantage in the House and 24–12 advantage in the Senate.

Major political parties don't have a history of impersonating opponents on the Internet, though online political mockery is rife. "The fact that a political party has the balls basically to set up something like this is kind of outstanding," says Josh Sternberg, a digital-communications consultant. "The implications for this moving forward could be disastrous for both parties. It brings the level of discourse below what it was, and it wasn't high to begin with." At best, the sites risk fostering an ever-more-cynical political climate. At worst, they are deliberately deceiving voters.

Healy says the sites were created to let people see what he calls the "real members" of the state legislature. He calls the sites a mix of satire and humor, but still based in fact. All use the same "Meet Chris Donovan" template, and most have just one post headlined: "Give Me Your Money!" While Healy admits some might view the tactics as underhanded, he says this is how Republicans can cut through the clutter and get their information out in a Democrat-dominated state. "We got schooled by Barack Obama in the last election," Healy says of using the Internet for political gain.

Could the Democrats have prevented the fake site to begin with? Probably not, says Thomas Gensemer, a managing partner at Blue State Digital, which worked on Obama's Internet campaign. There are too many combinations of URLs for politicians to buy up every one (the Connecticut GOP used "meet" before every politician's name). But it is possible to combat the site's prominence online, as most people find Web sites through search engines like Google. "When it comes to reputational management online," Gensemser says, "suddenly the Internet is an equalizing stage, that some guy in his office somewhere or a kid in a room can have equal power as a big corporation or a big candidate." Donovan only has an official Connecticut House site, as he didn't create a campaign site for the '08 election. Had he made one, with regularly updated content, it would rank higher than the fledgling fake site in his Google results.

More often it's liberals, not conservatives, who pull political pranks online, says Alex Halavais, a communication professor at Quinnipiac University. Back in 1999, George W. Bush sued a fake campaign site. The fake Sarah Palin Twitter feed from the 2008 campaign is still running today. While to most, these pranks appear to be just that, inevitably some people will take them at face value. "We're not a very attentive society these days, and if I'm just going from link to link and looking at a very cursory level, I'm not assuming that it's not Chris Donovan—I'm assuming that it is," says Sternberg. The fake Connecticut sites only mention at the bottom of the page that they are "Paid for and authorized by the Connecticut Republican Party." Halavais says users who mistake these sites as real are similar to overseas organizations who publish stories from The Onion as news.

The Connecticut Democratic Party says it doesn't plan on resorting to the same "juvenile antics" as the GOP. But that isn't stopping others. The site ChrisHealy.info features a picture of Healy holding a baby with the tag line "Chris Healy: Because Babies are [sic] Tasty." The top post on the site says: "Let's exercise OUR freedom of speech and let the Republicans know that the Left are not going to be pushed around on the internet." Healy took it in jest. "I'm highly flattered," he joked. "I do like my babies over easy though—I don't like them well done." Bon appétit.