About 10 percent of the nation's voters said they made use of information that Upper House candidates posted on the Internet in deciding how to vote, according to exit polls.
In post-voting comments, 86.1 percent said they didn't go online to help them with election decisions, compared with only 10.2 percent who said they referred to campaign information on the Internet.
In the first national election in which online campaigning was legal, the parties went to great lengths to draw voters to their websites. Yet in four surveys conducted by Kyodo News from late June through mid-July, the percentage of people who said they would seek out online campaign information grew smaller as time went along. The first survey saw 39.4 percent of voters say they would go online to study the candidates, but the number had fallen to 25.6 percent in the last survey.
In the exit polls, 23.9 percent of voters in their 20s said they took into account online campaigning, compared with only 6.1 percent for people in their 70s or older.
Supporters of Midori no Kaze (Green Wind Party), at 19.4 percent, were most receptive to online information, followed by Seikatsu no To (People's Life Party), Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party), Your Party, New Komeito, the Liberal Democratic Party and the Japanese Communist Party.
The least receptive, at 9.1 percent each, were supporters of the Democratic Party of Japan and the Social Democratic Party.