A British newspaper that set off a trans-Atlantic political storm when it urged readers to write to Ohio voters in an attempt to sway their choice in the US presidential election has said it has ended the campaign.
The Guardian newspaper said Sunday that it stopped giving out names and addresses of undecided voters after hackers broke into its Web site a week ago, effectively ending "Operation Clark County."
Editors professed themselves overwhelmed with the response to the campaign -- a response that included Guardian reporters being deluged with thousands of angry e-mails from Americans.
The newspaper also abandoned plans to take four of the best letter writers to Springfield, Ohio, to meet voters. Instead it will send the winners to the "more tranquil" Washington for a vacation.
The Guardian had invited its readers to contact voters in Clark County, Ohio, a swing state, about the importance of the Nov. 2 election.
Within the first day, more than 3,000 readers logged on to the newspaper's Web site to obtain the name and address of an unaffiliated voter taken from electoral rolls.
The campaign became a worldwide story, and Web site readers from several countries, including Australia, Japan, Canada, Morocco, Chile, France and Italy, applied for addresses.
A spokesman for the newspaper said Sunday that the project went well, and that more than 14,000 addresses had been downloaded before the site was hacked into last weekend "presumably by someone unhappy with the debate we had created."
Thousands of voters in Clark County still may receive letters from readers who managed to download the Americans' addresses before the hackers hit.
Media editor Ian Katz reported that the newspaper received thousands of e-mails from angry US voters, many of them staunch conservatives and some of them abusive.
"Hey England, Scotland and Wales, mind your own business," one American wrote in a letter published on the newspaper's Web site. "We don't need weenie-spined Limeys meddling in our presidential election."
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