| Congressional view of email
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Personal Democracy Forum has a really interesting article by Kate Kaye on a study of how the US Congress views email. A sample:
...the majority of Congressional offices don't respond to constituent email with email; in fact just 17 percent of House offices and 38 percent of Senate offices use email for this purpose. As it turns out, most survey respondents who don't use email to respond worry that their messages could be altered and forwarded, thus misrepresenting their bosses' positions.
Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 15, 2005 01:10 PM
Comments
I am not surprised by that reasoning in my Hill days we purposely kept the member's signature off the website for much the same reason.
Posted by: Thomas | July 15, 2005 08:32 PM
I believe this is the reason that the government I work for does not have members of Cabinet respond electronically either. Members of the public can send in e-mails (or of course regular postal mail) or comments via the official web site, but to get an answer, they have to put in a postal address (and they will get feedback to this effect from the webmaster if they don't the first time.) If they don't want an answer, of course, they don't need to put in an address. There is no demand to disclose actual identity - a first or last name, or pseudonym, and a post office box, would be sufficient.
There was an incident a decade ago where a private opponent of the then government posted a number of Cabinet member's scanned signatures on a web site and invited people to misuse them. I think the guy had a visit from the local constabulary, but not for the politics of it.
So one understands the nervousness of the politicians, though one is not completely persuaded that the risk would outweigh the benefits of electronic responses. It could differ with the content of the correspondence, too. Fairly standard answers are safer than more tailored-to-the-individual responses.
Posted by: John G | July 16, 2005 09:12 PM