Sean Tevis -- my current favorite elected-office-seeking geek -- has gone from profiles on BoingBoing (and DLCC.org!) and landed in the Wall Street Journal.

As you'd imagine, the story is largely about the campaign's fundraising success. So far, Tevis has raised more than $95,000 -- almost entirely from small online donations. His GOP opponent plans to rake in just $35,000 (with very little of that money coming from individuals in his district).

The story includes one detail that I'm both simultaneously relieved and embarrassed that I didn't notice:

Mr. Tevis's coup de grâce was to embed a hidden message, in the source code. He knew that only fellow techies would bother scrolling through the dense lines of programming, so he rewarded them with a message asking them to tack an extra 88 cents on to any donation so he would recognize them. Nearly 20% of his 5,700 or so donors have done that. Mr. Tevis has become such a fund-raising machine that he is fielding calls from legislative candidates in other states asking for advice.

Sure enough, when you pull up the source code, there it is:

Hello person who cares enough to read source code.

Please donate $8.88 to my campaign. Any amount with 88 cents at the end is flagged for me to let me know that it came from someone who I guess is a lot like me. You'll also be entered into a drawing to win a prize and it will help save the world. Thank you.

I just can't get over how terrific and clever this whole thing is.

It’s not easy being a first-time candidate running against an incumbent. Especially if you are a Democrat campaigning in Kansas. To be successful, you need to have something going for you -- even if that’s just the drive to outwork your opponent every day.

But it really does pay to be smart.

Sean Tevis is an information architect from Olathe, Kansas. He’s running against Rep. Arlen Siegfreid, a deeply conservative Republican (even by Sunflower State standards), and apparently, he's got polling showing him running three points back.

He’s also a geek.

Faced with the challenge of raising the $26,000 it will take to make this stage of the race competitive, Tevis found a brilliant, clever way to tell his story and in doing so has captured the imagination of a certain part of the Internet.

Writing in the style of xkcd (a web comic read by the geekiest of geeks), Tevis laid out his reasons for running and asked for 3,000 people to contribute $8.34 to his campaign. And then the Internets responded.

His appeal was picked up by BoingBoing -- an incredibly popular geek culture blog -- and promoted thousands of times by news aggregators Digg and Reddit. All the traffic overwhelmed the servers hosting his website, but the donations kept pouring in.

By 9:30 on Monday morning, 5,298 people had given to his campaign. Previously (as Tevis notes in his comic), no state rep campaign in Kansas had ever attracted even 650 donors, and more remarkable still, Tevis lives in a district where just 6,327 people voted in the last election.

Obviously the specifics of Tevis' story can't necessarily be repeated (no way that every candidate will be able to finance her campaign with a clever comic strip), but there's a whole lot to be said for his creativity.

This is the Internet -- a place where leaders can connect with thousands of passionate potential supporters...if the campaign can find a way to stand out.

(cross posted at TDS)