But the general public has little to show for it.

On election night, there's no public access to the vote count. News organizations pay hundreds of dollars to the city to see voting returns on a password-protected Internet site. But dozens of political VIPs get election-night access for free.

The three city commissioners, in charge of the city election machinery, have been providing free Internet passwords to a group of public officials, political-party bigwigs and others with the right connections.

On the night of the April 22 primary election, they got to see unofficial, ward-by-ward returns - information that the city commissioners still have not posted on their public Web site, more than two months after the election.

State Sen. Vincent Fumo got 10 free passwords - at least twice as many as he needed, according to his office. Councilman Jim Kenney got five and attorney Kevin Greenberg, who represents the commissioners in a federal voting-rights case, got six.

John Dougherty, the electricians union leader who ran to replace Fumo in the Senate, got one free password, and the union's political director, Bobby Henon, got two.

Other free passwords went to six City Council members, a dozen ward leaders in both the Democratic and Republican parties, two candidates for state treasurer and about a dozen state House members in both parties.

The disparity in access was uncovered by Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, 27, a political activist who has been fighting the city commissioners for two months over electronic access to election results.

"They said I could come in and look at the returns on paper, if I wanted to," said Urevick-Ackelsberg, founder of the Young Philly Politics Web site. "But the connected people have electronic access at their disposal."

"It's not as easy as it sounds," said Deputy City Commissioner Renee Tartaglione, daughter of commissioners' chairwoman, Margaret Tartaglione.

She said that the city's vote-counting equipment, manufactured by Danaher Controls, allows Internet access to no more than 150 people at once, requiring the city to limit the number of passwords it provides.

"That's a really, really goofy excuse," replied Urevick-Ackelsberg. "You could pay a [tech-savvy] kid $12 an hour to come up with a fix to that limit, just taking those results and spitting them out onto a public Web site."

For years, Philadelphia has lagged behind neighboring counties and the rest of the state as far as providing easy access to election returns.

The suburban counties put up-to-date vote totals on their Web sites while they counted ballots the night of the primary. Philadelphia has results available on paper, but nothing on the commissioners' Web site, even today.

A spokesman for Mayor Nutter, Doug Oliver, noted that Tartaglione and the two other city commissioners, Republican Joseph Duda and Democrat Anthony Clark, are elected on their own, independent of the mayor, leaving the administraiton with no real influence in the situation.

But Oliver said that no one in the mayor's office had gotten a free password to see election returns ahead of the general public. Even in the critical mayoral primary last year, Oliver said, "we got our election results the way most people did, off the TV." *