On Communicating With the Government--I ponder different methods as I write to the FCC

This week there was considerable fuss, first about the FCC’s proposal to repeal the net neutrality rules, and then about the emails they received in response—in particular, those emails that appeared to have false or temporary addresses or to have originated from Russia. This started me thinking about our communications with our government more generally. Since we are usually communicating with our legislators about bills (rather than sending comments to the FCC), I’m just going to talk about that.

The point of communicating with your congressperson is to influence his/her decisions and change his/her behavior. There are three ways a communication (letter/email/call/visit) could do this.

(1) The content of the communication could be reasons for or against the bill in question.

(2) People’s communications could arrive in such profusion that it causes chaos and makes it impossible for the legislator to ignore the fact that people are concerned about the bill, and maybe also impossible to conduct the rest of his/her business.

(3) The communications could give evidence of grassroots opinions—that many people are very concerned about the bill.

The first possibility, that the communications will give the legislator reasons to change his/her mind, seems fairly unlikely. Probably by that point, he/she has already heard most of the reasons given by both sides, has made up his/her mind to some degree, and isn’t likely to even see, let alone be influenced by, any single communication. (Other people are opening the mail and answering the phone anyway, especially if the legislator is getting tons of mail and phone calls.) Still, that doesn’t mean the communication doesn’t need to offer any reasons. If nothing else, it will give the office workers who tally people’s positions a general sense of people’s reasons.

The second possibility, that the sheer volume of communications is what matters, suggests that politics is a matter of beating your legislator into submission, which is a pretty cynical view of things, though maybe with a grain of truth to it. Maybe we want the letters to be disruptive enough to get the legislator’s attention, but surely not so much that it prevents him/her from doing other useful things, or thinking about other forthcoming bills. Otherwise legislators won’t be able to do anything most of the time, and why would we want that?

The third possibility seems the strongest. If lots of people hold a particular opinion on a bill and hold it very strongly, then not only should the legislator, as representative, be concerned about representing their view, but the legislator’s vote on the bill could have an effect on his/her chances of re-election. And that’s a powerful motivator.

How much is his/her vote on the bill likely to affect his/her re-election? Well, how many people are for it, and how strongly do they feel? Both matter. If lots of people support the bill but only lukewarmly, the legislator could probably get away with voting against it. If only a few people support it, it doesn’t matter how much they care, they still only have a few votes to give.

So what kind of evidence do the various forms of communication give of these things? Long ago, when I was an intern in Congressman Whitehurst’s office*, I was given the relatively unimportant job of looking up the addresses of people who had signed their names to form postcards. Form postcards were, I think, supplied by political organizations and probably dropped off by them as well—I don’t think the individuals who signed the cards had to actually mail the cards themselves. But they did have to sign their names and maybe give their town. I was to look up the full addresses so the office could send them a form letter in response.

Remember, this was before most people had personal computers, and well before there was a world wide web. No cutting and pasting letters (except in the very literal sense) and no email. So there were form postcards, regular letters, phone calls (long distance was still expensive), and personal visits. Form postcards were the least important, because they took the least effort and expense on the part of the sender.

Now emails make communicating with your legislator easier, but as this week’s kerfuffle makes clear, there is the problem of knowing whether the email represents a particular individual, or if it has been sent by a bot, or if one individual or sneaky organization has sent many emails, and whether the sender is even an American and eligible to vote.

On top of that, emails can be sent with very little effort, especially if they are pre-written and addressed by an organization, so that the individual has only to enter his or her email address and click a button. So the emails don’t do a good job of showing just how much the sender cares about the issue. Is this a make-it or break-it issue for them, or just one among many concerns?

So I’m sending the FCC chairman and commissioners hand-written letters that will arrive with my local postmark on them. I doubt hand-written letters are a solution long-term. If people take to writing their letters by hand, some sneaky group may find a way to fake them. On the other hand, it costs 49 cents apiece to mail them, so maybe no organization will find it worth the money.

On reflection, I should have sent a single letter to the FCC in general.

Till next post.

*I was politically apathetic in high school, but we were required to intern in a congressional office junior year. I had no idea where to start, so I took the suggestion of the program director and asked to intern in G. William Whitehurst’s office. They were lovely people, but I don’t remember ever actually trying to find out what their positions on any issues were. I’m not sure what most of the issues of the day even were, other than nuclear arms policies. I find it funny now, to think that I, who even then counted myself at least vaguely a Democrat, did my internship in a Republican’s office. I really had no idea what I was about. Fortunately, they were very patient.