Congress Still Figuring Out E-Mail

Jett writes " Vote.com has an interesting article in their Webmag Fifth Estate about how congressmen have responded to the popularity of e-mail in their daily operations. Quote: 'Of the 440 voting and non-voting House of Representatives members, 22 have no e-mail at all. Even House Speaker Dennis Hastert is wired only halfway -- his office receives e-mail, but does not respond to it. And while all U.S. senators have e-mail, they, like their House counterparts, routinely shun non-constituent mail -- even though they chair committees whose decisions affect the entire country.'"

Comments

Ways to get to a Congressman/Senator

[ronfar]

The main thing about Congressman and Senators is that they will take positions on presumably safe issues that that they presume will win them votes but they don't really care about. Most of them are pretty ignorant about technology, and, for example, if you tell them, "The most popular video game currently available is called Blood & Gore and the plot of the game is to gun down innocent schoolchildren and nuns," they'll probably believe you (or figure that you are "close enough for government work.")

I have always assumed congressional Email works like this. The congressman or Senator has a bunch of interns who don't necessarily have a lot to do all the time, they set one of the interns to read the incoming Email. If it is something important to the politician ("Bill gates wants to donate to your campaign") or something the intern cares about, they'll tell the politician. If not, they'll just delete it and move on. It's sort of like that episode of the Simpsons where Burns builds the sun-blocker. To paraphrase Mayor Quimby, "I have composed a polite but strongly worded letter which I will pass to Mr. Burn's underlings. Hopefully, with some cajoling, they will pass it along to him, or at least give him the gist of it."

A big pile of paper mail, however, will have the politician come into his office and say, "Wow, look at all that mail!" The politician is bound to take notice if it is mostly against something he or she is doing, though it might not change his or her mind. (Stuff they don't really care about, which I believe includes a lot of tech related issues, is not something they are going to risk votes over.)

Politicians, of course, care most about constituents. However, there are other groups they care about:

1. Big contributors.

2. Members of their parties. The more powerful, the better. If you are the head of your local Republican or Democratic organization, you have more power than a rank and file member. So, being involved in local politics gives you more of a voice on the national level.

A recent article in Salon, pointed out that there is one congressman who gets more campaign contributions from the Florida Cuban community than he does from people in his own state. This guy is also what the Romans considered an honest politician, he stays bought and can be counted on to support the legislation of these campaign contributions. (And the current battle over Elian Gonzales.)

Of course, people (myself included) hate the fact that support for an issue really comes down to money as well as votes, but that's the way the government works. So, I suggest to any millionaires in the OpenSource, Internet or Game industries that they put some money into campaigns. Money makes politicians care about the issue, if it all comes from the pro-filter/pro-censorship/anti-OpenSource side, well, you can guess what kind of laws will be passed.

Personally I'd love to see major reform of the political system and that really means politicians from outside the two party system getting elected. (Such as Libertarians, for example.)

They lag permanently.

[MattXVI]

When I worked as a Congressional staffer a couple of years ago, the staffs were stretched pretty thin, even in majority offices. The assumption was that email came third after phone calls and non-photocopied snail mail. Most offices believed that email was too convenient, and the folks who really cared would phone or write a letter. Some offices had been experimenting with context-sensitive auto-responders, but those still have to be double-checked.

Of course, some members of Congress just don't give a flip. Several hundred members are in safe seats, where they really have to screw up to risk losing. It's the others who have the best constituent services, not surprisingly.

Also, keep in mind that Congress attracts lawyers, activists, and a few businessmen. Most are not really tech-savvy (though most are curious). I'd like to make an Al Gore joke here, but you can do that for yourself. For those of you sick of the Al Gore/Internet gaffe, he recently claimed to have discovered and publicized the Love Canal problem in the 80's (he didn't, and it was in the news for a year before he saw it) and he claimed to have written the original Earned Income Tax Credit legislation, which was actually written before he entered Congress. Clinton also credited the growth of the WWW from "50-60 pages to millions of pages", to Al Gore this week.

Reliance on email and internet communication will eventually happen all over Capitol Hill. Just allow for a ten-year lag or so between them and the non-governmental world. They just got used to fax machines in the early 90's.

It's understandable....

[Eric Albert]

It's worth keeping in mind that members of Congress have limited budgets for staff, and that they usually run pretty close to their limits. When I worked in a Representative's office, we had one and a half staffers answering snail mail full-time, out of a staff of about eight. Each letter took at least 3-5 minutes to respond to, and more thought-provoking ones took a lot longer.

Now consider how easy it is to email your Representative. It'd probably take you about thirty seconds to send off a paragraph to all 538 of them. Multiply that by a zillion people emailing, and you'll see why it's simply impossible for them to respond. Ideally they'd at least have autoreplies, but that's up to the individual office, and that means that it really depends on how technically savvy each office is. Simply the cost of the staff to do anything beyond that would run to at least $50,000 per year per office, though...so is the value of being able to email your Representative worth another $25 million or so per year in funding? It depends, but I think that'd have a tough time getting approved.

Auto sorters and responses worse than no email.

[KahunaBurger]

I would much rather my representitives had no email access and I knew that, than have them use a sorting and auto-response program. There is a group marketing email sorting software for legislaters now which will supposedly identify the topic and a yes/no from each letter and then just tell her that her constituent mail for the day had 8 in favor of the death penalty and 10 against. As a political activist, I have to say that this SUCKS.

When I was helping fight a mini DOMA here in MA, my group set up a page on our web site to enable people to email or fax their state reps (along with the governer and the heads of both houses) on the issue. There was a very short subject statement (mostly to make sure that our opposition didn't use the setup to write things in favor of the bill) and then people wrote personal additions. These personal statements were great. People talked about their lives, about how this legislation would effect them, how their crrent legal status effected them, real information, not just a "please vote no". As a result of the volume of email, but also in response to the content of it, we had legislaters who normally would have ignored the issue testifying with us at the committee hearing, and one committee member who we had previously had no contact with cutting through the vauge "family values" talk and asking witnesses in favor of the bill hard questions about the real people involved.

Now this story shows that email advocacy can work, if its implemented well. But it also shows how "improvements" to that technology can make the political process worse. We won new people over to us because we gave them information they didn't have before, and showed them a personal, real life side of the issue that they may not have considered. An auto-response system or content sorter telling them "53 constituent emails opposing H472" would be unlikely to have the same effect.

Plenty of constraints

[Wellspring]

A couple of points:

As has already been said, most offices have about 40 people working for them. Many of them are answering phones, doing clerical work, etc (just like any office). With that said, the offices I have had contact with do handle email they receive. They print it out and handle it like normal mail, for reasons given below.

Virtually all the offices respond via snail mail. There are couple of reasons for this. First, there is security-- it is easier to detect forgery on paper mail. Second, it is easier for the Congressman/Senator to look over and approve a paper letter than an email before it is sent. Finally, the software/hardware is very old, and tough to adapt anyway, for reasons below.

Congressional offices operate under ridiculous rules and regulations. You'd think, hey, these guys write the laws, why not just change them? But the reality is that offices lack the resources to do software support on their own, and the rules were originally designed to be tough to change to prevent abuse.

Finally, on the subject of responding to people outside your district, you have to think about it this way. You only represent your district (the better interest of the nation as a whole counts as part of this, but since every issue is painted as a critical 'take one for the team' issue, it wears thin quickly). They are the only people who vote for you. It is therefore a disservice to them to spend resources on others which would have helped them. If they are so concerned about something, they can tell their congressman. Put another way, as Robert A. Heinlein said before basically giving the same advice I just did, "the votes are in the precincts".

Hey, Congress staffers read Slashdot, don't they? Tell us what software you use! Maybe we can improve it. It would be a public service, so RMS would like it. ;)

It's Understandable all right...

[clyons]

How difficult does it need to be to express your wishes to Congress before they are considered? Did Congress refuse to accept Telegrams (transmitted via telegraph) when Western Union came into being, because it was too easy? Did they refuse telephone calls when reliable long distance became a reality? How about teletype?

Before the telegraph, was writing a letter considered too easy? Would Congress only consider the wishes of their constituants if they came to them in person to express their wishes?

All of these innovations that revolutionized communications also revolutionized politics. News was faster. People could let Congress know how they wanted their representatives to act. People knew faster then ever before the actions of their Congress. But as far as I know (and I may be wrong here), but none of these advancements in communication were ever considered to be "Too Easy", and as such ignored.

It is another change, and as we have all seen, Congress never adopts and adapts to change unless they think it benefits them.

It should be easy to make our views known to Congress. We should not have to spend 33 cents for a stamp plus paper and envelope, when we can send an e-mail for no additional cost then the internet access we already have. We also should not be required to call the Congressional Switchboard long distance.

But it comes to no suprise that Congress wishes to dismiss the on-line community. After all, the Internet allows for the free flow of information, and Congress has been trying to limit that for a number of years. Remember the Telecommunications Decency Act? Attempts to tax the internet? (Yea, some were fakes, Urban Legends and people who didn't know when to stop forwarding e-mail, but a few were real.) How about the Post Office wanting to enact a fee for sending an e-mail? There's also the attempts to limit encryption for privacy purposes, attempts to enact encryption standards that they had backdoor keys for, and of course all the bad press the on-line community gets when someone commits a horrible crime and it's discovered that the perpetrator had a homepage or used the net.

&Deity forbid that congress respond to the people and actually do what we want them to. That would totally subvert our system of government!

OT but funny

[Gaccm]

yes, yes i know this is unrelated to the story, but i got this in my email and felt like sharing it:

Can you imagine working at the following Company? It has a little over
500 employees with the following statistics:

*29 have been accused of spousal abuse
*7 have been arrested for fraud
*19 have been accused of writing bad checks
*117 have bankrupted at least two businesses
*3 have been arrested for assault
*71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
*14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
*8 have been arrested for shoplifting
*21 are current defendants in lawsuits
*In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving

Can you guess which organization this is? Give up?



It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group
that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed
to keep the rest of us in line.

I'm not sure I blame them

[iceT]

One thing I've noticed about the Internet in general is that people REALLY like their anonimity. I've seen things typed in e-Mail and newsgroup messages that people would a) never say to someones face, and b) probably not even write in a email with their REAL name behind it.

Even here at /. there are a LARGE number of people that post anonomiously, or have a tendancy to really 'hack' away at someones response, rather than just offering a "counter view-point..."

If I was them, I wouldn't be too quick to responde to an email from 'cherrypicker@hotmail.com', at lease not when I have a phone calls from "Agnes Miller, (734-555-1515)" and snail-mail letters from "Richard Bronner, 123 Main St, somecity, mystate..."

It's really a shame too, because I'm a HUGE email fan...!

Why they shouldn't make our laws!

[resonance]

I see this as further evidence that our lawmakers are incompetent when it comes to creating legislation that affects the computer and Internet world. How can we expect them to make sensible laws when they don't even have the most BASIC understanding of what they are regulating?

I'll say again what I've said in a previous posting on /., that we need to have schools that specificially train people in computer law, and that these people need to advise and lobby our lawmakers, they need to educate them in the technology and the subtleties of it so they can be effective at their jobs.

I've always been scared when I hear of ANY new computer-related law coming out, because I know that 80% of them don't make any sense from the technology perspective that the geeks have. There needs to be a balance between the geek view and the corporate view and the political view. Right now it is too heavily weighted towards the political and corporate views, because they don't know any better.

If the laws keep getting worse, I'm gonna move to the Falkland Islands to raise sheep, and give up computers entirely! =)

We need properly trained lawmakers! Help us!