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."
"And frustrated offices are faced with two less-than-ideal choices: delete the e-mail and ignore a potential constituent or spend valuable staff time and resources corresponding with nonconstituents - a civic-minded approach, perhaps, but not efficacious for Members who are up for re-election every two years. "
It always boils down to two things for them, money and re-election. The whole thing makes me sick.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Perhaps this will have the happy side effect of demonstrating to the polits that spam has true costs to recipients, not only in transfer-across-the-wire and storage costs, but in management costs as well.
Hopefully this will bring something good to bear. I doubt it but I hope it...
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
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.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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.
--
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Put your full name and your ZIP code if it is really your rep. The aides will recognize the zip as valid info, and a full name will lend credence enough to get the item past the first sweep and under a humans eye's.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Seriously, though, if you send something like the above to a politician I can virtually guarantee you won't get more than a passing glance at best.
And remember, your letter won't affect change if it isn't read. Period. Run it through a spell checker (and actually correct things) first.
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.
haha well in washington state here we have a real networks CEO so i suppose she would be spam savvy on her own but im really worried about some of the 60 or 70 + year old senators who dont have the time to learn how to deal with it... i guess it depends on your area... i should hope a seattle respresentative knows something about computers as they are a major force in the economy around here...
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.
Right now the best way to contact your Senators and Congressman is via phone. Postal mail sent to your represenatives DC offices is subject to long delays. From Senator Maria Cantwell's site:
"Mail service to my Washington, D.C. Senate office has resumed, but will be slowed down. It will take about three weeks for your letter to be delivered. I ask that you be patient with written correspondence to and from my office, and when possible use alternatives such as email, phone, or fax. Thanks."
Another alternative is to send postal mail to your representatives' district or state offices.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
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.
In theory, any citizen should have an equal influence on Congress' handling of any issue. Yet, due to the Congressional committee system, it is necessary to be heard by legislators of whom one is not a constituent for this to occur. If legislators "tune out" non-constituents, we're all effectively disenfranchised. Therefore, legislators should not be allowed to ignore non-constituents's comments on areas on which they have special influence.
window.....
"Just trying to get you to focus on the issues, M. Antoinette".
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
How will anti-spam legislation defeat all the Asian and African and European spam that dwarfs most of our email boxes? What, sue the ISP demanding that they stop this "allowal of spam transfer?" Oh wait, that sounds familiar.
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
Now that any right- or left-winger with an axe to grind can send an evelope full of confectioner's sugar, snail mail is not an option. Ask youself, how many of those mails delayed by the anthrax panic were critical of the PATRIOT act and other scams? Right, probably no one knows. During a key window of time, when the need for citizen input was most critical, citizen input was removed from the decision process.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I cringe every time someone says that sending a fax or a snail mail to one's representative or senator is more effective than sending an email. Guess what? It's really not. Why trust me? Because I worked in Congress.
Here's what happens to your letters in most congressional offices: First, an intern or secretary gets the mail and sorts it into groups based on the contents of each letter. Many letters are from actual groups that represent one lobby or another: those get sent to various legislative assistants who can send some specifc info to each group.
Then, there is the mail from constituents, much of which consists of generic postcards...AARP postcards exceeded by far any other postcard received by the office in which I worked. Those old people sure know how to send in those damn postcards! These get counted up each day, but don't merit a personal response. More rare are actual letters from constituents. These go to a secretary or an intern who basically works off of this template:
Dear [name],
Thank you for writing about [issue]. I appreciate your input on [issue]. [Stance on issue].
Sincerely, [signature of elected official produced using a laser printer or a stamp]
Then, there is stuff marked "personal," which goes to the congressperson's personal secretary. I think the congressperson might actually read some of this, but don't try marking stuff personal when it's really just some political bullshit. That probably breaks some law, or, at the very least gets you on the congressperson's bad side.
So, you want to know what really works? One way to go is "voting with your dollars," but c'mon, you can't possibly have more money than any of the real lobbying groups that bombard your congressperson with propoganda (read: $$$) day after day. The other way is to set up an appointment to actually speak, face to face, with your congressperson. It actually happens. This may require you to join some sort of group, but if you believe strongly enough in a cause, it's worth it to get over your fear of public speaking and attempt to talk to the person who supposedly represents you. That is the only way you stand a chance of not being just another letter ignored.
PS, I don't give a fuck how you mod this, but sometimes, the truth hurts.
I just completed a 10 week internship in a Congressional office where they found my technically savvy to be of a great deal of use to their office. They had we working on website and streamlining their mail system after just a couple of weeks on the job. So, here are my couple of observations from those weeks.
1) e-mails are just as important as phone calls. An office gets a phone call with someone saying "I opposed issue X", they tell that person they will "pass the comment on to the Congressperson" and if your lucky, they will tally the support on a sheet. The same goes with e-mail, except that you get a nice little letter that will actually explain the Congresspersons position. Granted it will be form letter, but it usually is enough to know where the rep stands.
2) being a constituent is EVERYTHING. Most offices in the House use something call "IQ", an awful little program written to make full use of IE activeX capabilities. IQ, for all of its failings, has an incredible address checker, and can determine if a letter is from the within their district or not. But you have to get the address to them in the right format, which means using their webform submissions... NO public e-mails.
3) I really can't stress this point enough... a constituent is a constituent, whether it be phone, fax, mail, or carrier pigeon. Any office that wants to be reelected gives every piece the same effort, because people who write are people who vote. The best way to be ignored is to say "if I e-mail it will just be processed by some staffer, so I won't bother." Everything is processed by a staffer (unless you're a personal friend), so get out their and send an e-mail. Personalize it if you wish, but it really doesn't matter... they just want to know who you are and what you think your representatives stance on the issues ought to be. Never forget, these people pay money for polling data that you are giving them for free. They are happy to receive it.
I hope this helps a bit in everyones political adventures.
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
Yup, that does work. I went and met my Congressman, Bruce Vento (since deceased), to talk to him about a couple of issues -- he was on the Banking Committee and was in hearings about new banknotes, so I talked to him about that, and also about the IT industry. We talked for a good 20 minutes in his office, face-to-face, nobody else there.
I also got to talk to my Senator's chief of staff -- getting to meet your Senator is pretty hard, but the chief of staff is the next best thing (talked to him about the same issues as well as immigration issues because of my wife).
An aside: this goes both ways. I was very happy that Vento and Wellstone's chief of staff met me and took a fair amount of time to talk (about 20 minutes each); both took notes and I got pretty detailed responses by mail later. That was good. So I didn't feel at all bad about voting for them -- I was glad that they at least seemed to care about what I was talking about.
The "other" Senator from Minnesota at the time was Rod Grams. His office wouldn't even give me the time of day. I probably wouldn't have voted for the twit anyway, but that really needlessly insulted a potential voter (and he's no longer in office ;-> ).
All you have to do is look in the phone book, call your congresscritter's office, ask for an appointment (but tell them in advance what you want to talk about so they don't think it's a prank), and they will usually take the time to meet you. Maybe even bring some fellow constituents along to drive the point home.
Much harder to ignore a gaggle of constituents in your office than a lousy e-mail or postcard, and makes a bigger impression because you took the time to go there and meet them.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
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.
Go to a campaign appearance by your Rep. Find out the name of the aide who handles the issues you're interested in. Email directly to this aide. The format is firstname.lastname@mail.house.gov
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary