VIRTUAL WASHINGTON

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Rain or shine, few Americans will go to the polls on Election Day in November 2020. Most will vote by modem, telephone or mail -- and overall citizen participation will be much greater than it is today. So will citizen interest, partly because four or five reasonably serious presidential candidates will be on the ballot, along with at least one official referendum and perhaps half a dozen national advisory referendums. Enthusiasm for the democratic process will have reached a point where even Washington should be more popular.

Too hopeful? Perhaps. But it's no pipe dream. Technology, whose image has suffered under a century's worth of dictators, Orwellian novels and a long cold war, is becoming a key to the revitalization of U.S. politics. The 1990s are witnessing technology's re-emergence in the healthier role foreseen by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as an enabler and propagator of democracy.

The stakes are enormous. The science needed to effect this revolutionary transition is at hand; it's the nation's psychology that lags. Americans are still exorcising political ghosts and brooding about run-amuck populism through electronic plebiscites dominated by Rush Limbaugh and The Simpsons. But a gradual, successful infusion of new technology into 21st century politics should serve to build confidence among skeptics. The mood of the nation is ripe. Last year survey takers reported that U.S. computer owners listed politics online as one of their highest priorities. And the newest political parties and movements often show a high-tech underpinning. Ross Perot's 1992 organizers, for example, drew their highest ratios of petition signers in high-tech strongholds -- from Massachusetts' Route 128 across the nation to Silicon Valley and Silicon Prairie. Upbeat theorists are prognosticating a ``virtual Washington'' in which members of Congress can debate and vote from back home, and several Representatives have asked to be allowed to vote from their districts. Newt Gingrich, the first self-proclaimed futurist to become the Speaker of the House, is in the process of putting Capitol Hill online, allowing computer users to gain access to pending legislation through a new information system named ``Thomas'' after -- who else? -- Thomas Jefferson.

History and political science suggest that voters are more discerning than the critics of ``hyperdemocracy'' (themselves often elites fearful of displacement) have been warning. ``On most major issues we've dealt with in the past 50 years,'' pollster George Gallup Sr. noted in 1984, ``the public was more likely to be right -- based on the judgment of history -- than the legislatures or Congress.''

We should recall that between the Renaissance and the 19th century Industrial Revolution, new communications technology, from the printing press to the telegraph, generally spurred mass political participation. True, today's Pollyannas could end up looking as foolish as the doomsayers of that era once did -- like Alfred Lord Tennyson, who gushed that the telegraph would result in ``war banners furled'' and a ``parliament of the world.'' Yet it is really our own century that has turned from enthusiasm for the benefits of science to a kind of techno-pessimism: instead of advancing participatory democracy, early radio and then television actually buoyed the strength of central governments, authoritarian leaders and mass-merchandise hucksters.