From Your House to the White House… Right!

admin ♦ July 6, 2005 ♦ 6 Comments

I tried to email President Bush today about his upcoming nomination to the Supreme Court. To get to the send button, I had to take a long and arduous route, which I will describe now.

From White House home page, I clicked on the Contact link. That took me to a page with a variety of contact options, including the White House Web Mail. I clicked on this link to get to the form, but it took me to an instruction page with no form… yet. I clicked Continue and finally got to the form… or at least the first page of the form.

The first thing I was asked on this form is whether I wanted to write a supporting comment, a differing comment, or a general comment. Right away, I began to feel the chill running up my spine. Since he had offered no nominee yet, I selected general comment.

Immediately below my disclosure of my disposition, I was asked to choose a subject. In the left column I selected Legal and Judicial. Once selected, the right column changed to offer sub-topics. Unfortunately, there were no sub-topics related to judicial nominees, even though the White House has been very public about this issue for quite some time. Since none of the sub-topics even came close, I decided to select Hate Crimes, as I was already beginning to hate this web mail form.

After clicking the Continue button to proceed, I was whisked away to the fifth webpage. Here I was asked to fill out my contact information. All of the fields were required… full name, full address, and email address. When I clicked Continue, I was whisked to an error page telling me to click the link provided to start again… back to the first page of the web mail form.

After doing it all over again, I was able to break through this error (WITHOUT changing my entries in the form at all). I arrived at the sixth page of my second round of data entry. This page provided me an open field to write my letter.

I wrote the following letter about Hate Crimes:

Dear President Bush,

Please remember that the Supreme Court should interpret cases in a manner that upholds the Constitution. Neither liberal nor conservative justices should be allowed to legislate from the bench.

Since our legal system is based on precedence, it is essential that any nominee recognize that many of our rights have been established through the process of legal precedent set out in past decisions by the court.

Also, please note that the Constitution must be viewed as a living document. To say otherwise would be the same as saying the original text of the Constitution defining slaves as 2/3′s of a person should never have been changed by a court decision. I am sure you do not believe this.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Alan Rosenblatt

After clicking Continue, I was taken to the seventh page, where I was asked to preview my letter. Then I clicked Continue, yet again, where I was taken to an eighth page asking me if I wanted to make an additional submission and telling me that I would receive an email confirmation within 72 hours that REQUIRES me to reply in order for the email I just wrote to be processed.

Now here is the kicker: it is generally accepted that each page a person has to click through to take an online action reduces the likelihood that the action will be completed by half. So, here we have eight webpages requiring seven click throughs AND an email reply within the next 72 hours.

So let’s do the math… if we start with 100 percent of those who click on the Contact link on the White House home page, half of that is 50 percent, half again is 25 percent, half again is 12.5 percent, half again is 6.25 percent, half again is 3.125 percent, half again is 1.5625 percent, and half again is 0.78125 percent. Finally, we would be lucky if half of those people (0.390625 percent) ultimately reply to the email they get a couple days later.

What does this tell us? It says that the President does not want us to write to him, generally, and most assuredly doesn’t want us to write about judicial nominations.

Who does this guy represent???