Dr. DigiPol

Software to split wheat from e-mail chaff,
by Thomas Shapley, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Here is my response to the article linked to above:

Dear Mr. Shapley,

After reading your column “Software to split wheat from e-mail chaff” in the June 27th issue of the Post-Intelligencer, I feel it is important to clear up some misconceptions I see in your analysis. While I appreciate the bind Congressional offices face having given their 4-fold increase in constituent communications without any increase in staff or administrative budget, your characterization of the problem is significantly off the mark.

First, regarding the ease of sending these emails, constituents, like members of Congress, face the daunting task of trying to keep up with a wide range of policy initiatives that will always exceed their personal expertise. To manage this problem, Members of Congress hire professional staff to provide expertise on the issues. Constituents do not have staffs to help them. Instead we find and join advocacy groups that provide us with expert research and analysis on the issues we care about. Thus, sending emails to Congress on impending policy votes is not just a mindless click and send. It is the culmination of a long process of finding advocacy groups that care about the same issues we care about, subscribing to their issue updates, and following the issue over time through these updates and on the group’s website. Then, when a vote is coming up, the advocacy group alerts us that it is time to act, often providing us with a pre-written letter or talking points. Most of the time, we are given the opportunity to edit the message to Congress, though many do not… why change a letter that is crafted well to deliver the message?

In any event, these are not “automated” massages to Congress, as you write, but facilitated. There is a big difference. These emails, whether they are form messages or personalized missives are from REAL constituents exercising their First Amendment right to petition the government with grievances. And while form emails may not rise to the top of the persuasive pile, they should not be dismissed since they are from real citizens.

Now, many Congressional staffers defending the logic puzzle will claim that for every form email campaign they receive, at least one or two constituents will complain when they get the message back, saying they never sent the original message. But if you look at the numbers, I would wager that for each complaint of this sort, hundreds, if not thousands of other constituents do not raise this complaint. I see this as evidence that the form emails come from real people and complaints come from anomalies.

What type of anomalies? Here are some very likely ones:

The reply from Congress is so late in coming back to the constituent that they forgot they sent the email.
The email was sent by a spouse unwittingly logged in as their partner.
They simply forgot they sent it.

When evaluating the emails coming into their offices, Congressional staff have to assess the importance of the communication to the Member and the Member’s voting intentions. As I said, form emails are never as persuasive as personal communications, but if an office gets hundreds or thousands of form emails supporting (and opposing an issue…because both sides do it), tallying the numbers on each side is an important indicator of sentiment in the district (or state). Remember, whether people send their email via the Congressional website or through the advocacy group’s email form (often provided by Capwiz, GetActive, Democracy in Action, Convio, or Kintera) they must enter a physical address in the Member’s jurisdiction. This is a clear indicator that these emails are real constituent communications and not SPAM.

As for the “vested interests” of the advocacy groups listed in your article, my understanding of the American political system is that we are a representative democracy based upon a pluralist system that aggregates individual citizen interests into interest groups (another Constitutional right… freedom of assembly). The vested interests of these groups, which come from all political perspectives, is to give a stronger voice to concerned citizens by aggregating them. This is the hallmark of American democracy. Yet you characterize it as some baneful evil.

As a concerned citizen, I often write my Congressional delegation on issues I care about. I often write a personal email using the email systems provided by the advocacy groups I subscribe to. The logic puzzle impedes the delivery of these personal emails every bit as much as it impedes me when I simply send the form email.

I have been concerned about this issue ever since I read the Congressional Management Foundation’s report last Summer that nearly 50% of Congressional staffers think form emails are fake and another quarter aren’t sure one way or the other. Since then, I have written to my delegation explaining that whether I send a form email or a personalized email, they are most definitely from me.

I reiterated this message recently in an email to Senator George Allen. I was concerned that he never responded to any of my emails, regardless of their personalization. The response from his office was quick and overwhelming. I received a long email addressing my issue concerns and a phone message asking me to call them and reconcile the 3 email addresses I had attached to my street address… as if this was the reason they had never written back to me. Truth be told, I have more than 3 email addresses and use them all. There was nothing preventing them from replying to any of my emails using the address I used to send the message in the first place. But they didn’t.

To me, the message I am getting is that Congressional staff are so desperate to lighten their workload (understandably) that they will ignore a constituent in the process.

This is very bad for democracy.

Now I agree that taking pen to paper is more personal (in fact I prefer writing on paper with a fountain pen), but I think my right to communicate with Congress, regardless of the form or the channel, is far more “special” than how I choose to compose and send that communication.

In the final analysis, to characterize what I do when I communicate with my elected representatives as “the chaff of ditto-clicks” is an insult to my commitment to the issues that matter to me and an insidious threat to the principles of representative democracy.

Rather than trying to dismiss the millions of constituents who are sending form emails to Congress, maybe Congress should acknowledge them and call on their support for increasing their administrative staff and budget so they can get back to doing the people’s work. Congress must recognize that email is how America communicates and their ability to deepen their relations with constituents requires them to embrace email and figure out how to process it effectively.

Sincerely,
Alan Rosenblatt, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Birnbaum, of the Washington Post, also wrote a piece on the Logic Puzzle. And while he does a fair job at presenting both sides of the issue, there still remains the nagging problem that form emails sent by the actions of individual citizens are being confused with SPAM.

As I indicated to Mr. Shapley, these are facilitated emails, not automated. They may be written by an organization, but it is a real constituent that chooses to click on the send button. This is a far cry from the auto-email systems used by SPAMMERS. These auto-email systems are computer programs sending out mass emails to large lists of recipients. The facilitated emails are pre-written emails sent by a conscious act of a living, breathing constituent to ONLY their Congressional delegation. That is not only NOT SPAM, it is protected First Amendment speech.

Whether or not it is effective, it is the right of citizens to send these messages and Congress should not be impeding them as they try to block real SPAM.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Digital Politics, Rants, Raves, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.