Slashdot Mirror
Handling Email Overload in Congress
DedHerring writes "A piece from Roll Call, a newspaper on the hill, that describes how Congressional offices are working to identify which of the many bulk emails received are actually from constituents of their district. Worth a read to know if the click-through online petition you participate in is ever going to be considered by the recipient legislator. Confirms many posts in Slashdot on this topic."
Seems to be the best approach (short of actually talking face-to-face with them) to reach a representative.
I can remember once in high school where they 'make' us a write letter to our Representatives, Senators, Governor, etc. I actually received a response from my Rep about some educational issues / policies at the time. This was only a few years back (late 90s), so I can't imagine much as changed.
However, I've *never* gotten much (if any) response from email.
I think it shows that a well-written letter shows effort, and showing effort is an effective way to get across the message that 'you care.'
Here's a new way to fight spam: Paste your Congressperson's email all over your popular website. Soon they'll be getting tons of spam, and they'll get so fed up with filtering out the real mails they'll start passing anti-spam laws.
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Recently congressional mail has taken months. (Due, of course, to bioterrorism fears) I have friends that have found that 2002 mail takes a lot longer in Washington DC.
-Sean
This confirms my belief that the simplest forms of communications are often the least effective.
Email is most anonymous and potentially anonymous, and hence has the least chance of being taken seriously.
A phone call is better, and even more so a letter. But the best (and for obvious reasons), the hardest to to is a face to face meeting.
A solution to the problem mentioned: In australia we have an electoral roll, and I am sure you guys in the US do aswell. Why can't they just allow e-mail addresses to be added to the electoral role. Obviously some privacy protections would be needed, but it is surely possible.
On the otherhand, does it really matter if people are constituents or not? Is broad public and global opinion more important that those of an individual community, county or state? Hrm... an interesting question is posed here..... damn I don't have the answer to this one.
lounge around on the blue couch
Spam first got on my nerves in '94, and at the time very few members of Congress had websites, encouraged email. What I thought would be a great idea to get Congressional action on spam would be to get a few hundred thousand people to forward each and every piece of spam they received to all 535 members of Congress. Include a sentence in the body of the email to the effect of, "Dear Congressman / Congresswoman, Please pass legislation outlawing this kind of unsolicited commercial email.... blah blah blah...."
Now if each member of congress received a few hundred thousand pieces of forwarded spam a day, what might they do? Outlawing the forwarding of spam to elected officials, with a legislative suggestion, would certainly be more of a 1st Ammendment violation than outlawing spam itself.
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__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Why not just cut Congress off from the Internet in the first place? I am sure it costs a fortune to operate and secure from hackers. If they are not using it for our benefit, what's the point? If they need to surf and read e-mail, do it at home like most workers have too. Everything that Congress does, anyways, is printed in the Federal Register so disconnecting their offices doesn't prevent them from communicating to the public electronically. Congress ran for over 200+ years without e-mail and it doesn't seem to run better with it. Its not like they have figured why I'm not getting Social Security. Instead of ignoring e-mail, they could focus on fixing that.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I send about two constituent emails a month. I always get responses on issues I agree with my representatives on; I never get responses on issues I disagree with them on. As a third party voter, I overlap with both the majority parties quite a bit (Republicrats on gun control, Demicrans on free speech), yet it's obvious that the candidates don't give a crap about what I think, only about their market positioning.
I collect up and forward all my spam onto various MPs every so often. It certainly seems to be doing the trick with this MP ;-)
And I quote: "The MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey told The Register that he is "sick of the excuses" and wants something done to curb the amount of spam pouring into people's in-boxes.
In particular, he's concerned about the rising quantity of pornographic spam and the impact it may have on children using the Net. "
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Can the general public use these tags? I understand that this system was set up in co-operation between the government and two companies that sound like lobbiests for hire.
/dev/null.
How does my cousin in SF use this system to make sure his email will get to his senator? Does he have to go to one of these two companies and pay them to lable his email correctly?
Am I jumping to conclusions? Reading this quote.
In the House, groups could funnel their communications through the "Write Your Representative" Web form,
It sounds like you have to be a special interest group who has paid for the system to use it. This system might be used to filter all email, but if the general public aren't informed of how to use it, then their email will be sent to
Maybe there should be a web page at http://www.house.gov/ that would let you use this system, then you mom-and-pop AOL users can get "equal time".
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
What we really need is a unique email count for each congressman.
Then we need to not reelect the top 10% of these people, since they are obviously pissing off their constituents.
Email volume as more or less an inverse measure of approval...
-- Terry
That's an extremely optomistic estimate.
I have an associate who was among a group of citizens who managed to scor some face time with a couple of representatives from our state. They were told that some of the mail currently arriving is dated from December. But the worst aspect of it is the condition it arrives in after the irradiation and other special handling it receives because of the new "safety measures". The ink is frequently faded and illegible, the paper is rendered brittle and often already crumbled in pieces, and photographs are blistered. In short it has effectively ceased to be a useful means of communication.
This is attrocious when you consider that it had been the most practical, cheapest, AND most importantly, the most universally available means of communicating citizen opinion to our representatives.
With email being overwhelming to congressional offices as described here, it seems like faxing is the remaining method available for those who can't afford lobbyists. Sure, you can use fax machines at Kinko's, and prepaid phone cards for long-distance charges. But that's definitely a higher barrier than a piece of paper, envelope and $.37 stamp (let alone a postcard & $.23 stamp).
-Sporktoast
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.