The New York Times

December 13, 2001

E-Mail Gets the Cold Shoulder in Congress

By REBECCA FAIRLEY RANEY

IN theory, e-mail should be a useful tool for democracy, an easy and
prompt way for citizens to reach their representatives. And with the fear
and disruption
resulting from the discovery of anthrax in Congressional mail, e-mail
might seem an ideal alternative.

But although many members of Congress asked constituents to switch to
e-mail after mail delivery to their offices was halted in October, the
trend on Capitol
Hill seems to be a backlash against the medium.

Ill equipped to cope with the deluge of correspondence that the Internet
has brought, many Congressional offices no longer disclose e-mail
addresses to
the public. And both staff members and lobbyists say that e-mail is far
less successful than faxes, phone calls or letters in reaching and
influencing
legislators.

Based on a recent test for this article, e- mail is unlikely to elicit an
acknowledgment that it has been read. On Nov. 26, messages were sent to
the 65
Senate offices listing addresses on the Senate Web site. The messages
identified the sender as a reporter sending e-mail to members of Congress
to see
if, when and how they answered. Aside from 27 automated responses, only 7
Senate offices sent a reply within two weeks.

Many of the automated responses discussed the difficulties that e-mail
has created for Congressional offices. Staff members are deterred from
reading e-mail
because they receive up to 5,000 messages per week, many of them from
advertisers and non- constituents.

In one response, Larry Neal, deputy chief of staff for Senator Phil
Gramm, Republican of Texas, wrote, "The communication that Sen. Gramm
values most certainly
does not arrive by wire. It is the one where someone sat down at a
kitchen table, got a sheet of lined paper and a No. 2 pencil, and poured
their heart
into a letter."

Mr. Gramm's office, like many others, often responds to e-mail messages
on paper.

Also responding to the test were the offices of the Republican senators
Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Robert C.
Smith of New
Hampshire and Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, all of whom, like Mr. Gramm's
office, replied within four days. The offices of Kent Conrad of North
Dakota and
Carl Levin of Michigan, both Democrats, replied after nine days.

However, many Senate staffs were displaced at the time because of the
anthrax episode. And offices typically take three weeks or more to
respond to postal
mail, said Rick Shapiro, executive director of the nonprofit
Congressional Management Foundation.

Still, antipathy toward e-mail is evident on both sides of the Capitol.
Representative Brad Carson, Democrat of Oklahoma, said that when he took
office
in January, staff members from other offices warned him not to answer
e-mail with e-mail. "There's an institutional bias against adopting new
technology,"
Mr. Carson said in a telephone interview.

His office responds to e-mail within three or four days, he said. But
that practice remains an exception in an institution in which office
procedures are
built around logging and answering postal mail.

Congress received about 80 million e-mail messages last year, according
to the Congress Online Project, a two-year research effort financed by
the Pew Charitable
Trusts and conducted jointly by the Congressional Management Foundation
and George Washington University at (www .congressonlineproject.org). The
researchers
estimate that the number may have doubled this year. The House received
only about 17 million pieces of paper mail last year, according to House
administrators.
The Senate numbers for paper mail were not immediately available.

In March, a study by the Congress Online Project found that e-mail,
instead of promoting democracy, may be having the opposite effect. The
ease with which
e-mail can be sent and the push by advocacy groups for supporters to send
e-mail to Congress have raised the public's expectation of being heard,
the study
said. Instead, the report concluded, the "conflicting practices and
expectations of all the parties are fostering cynicism and eroding
trust."

In fact, because of the daunting task of keeping up with e-mail, nearly
one-third of the 100 Senate offices no longer accept e- mail through
public addresses,
whereas 83 had public e-mail addresses in 1996. Twelve of the 65 Senate
offices listing e-mail addresses sent responses that they no longer
respond to
e-mail sent to those addresses. Only about a quarter of the House offices
list e-mail addresses on their Web sites, compared with about a third in
1996.

Most Congressional offices, including several that still list e-mail
addresses, advise constituents to fill out forms at the legislators' Web
sites.

For example, an automated response from the e-mail address of Senator Jon
Kyl, Republican of Arizona, provided a link to his Web site with
directions to
communicate through Web-based forms and to consult a section called Issue
Positions.

The message reflects the problem that electronic communication has
created for many Congressional offices: "In an effort to respond as
quickly and thoroughly
as possible," Mr. Kyl's message said, "I am no longer receiving e-mail at
this address."

Consultants who specialize in Internet campaigning discourage the
practice of lobbying solely through e-mail. Though several small
companies sell products
that route e- mail to Congress through Web sites, managers of those
companies said that sales amounted to less than $10 million per year.

Some consultants, however, said that certain e-mail campaigns had worked.
Pam Fielding, founder of E-advocates in Washington, said that an e-mail
campaign
helped rescue the Violence Against Women Act last year. A week before the
Senate vote, she said, leaders of the Stop Family Violence campaign sent
a request
for accounts of domestic violence to the campaign's e-mail list of 36,000
supporters. Within 24 hours, she said, the request had yielded 6,000
stories
for Congress via e-mail.

"You had priests talking about their parishioners and moms talking about
daughters who are no longer alive," she said.

The bill passed, and shelters and hot lines for battered women received
$3.3 billion over five years. Ms. Fielding was cautious about attributing
the passage
of the bill to any one factor but said that "we knew we were influential"
in sending the e-mail.

Nonetheless, Jonah Seiger, co-founder of Mindshare Internet Campaigns,
which designs online communication strategies for trade associations,
nonprofit groups
and corporations, said he had not advised any of his clients to lobby via
e-mail.

Mr. Seiger has helped groups attract and organize supporters online and
has then created efficient methods for them to use Web sites that convert
e-mail
messages into letters, faxes and telegrams to Congress.

The objective of any campaign, he said, is to create a tangible sense of
pressure within a Congressional office through ringing telephones,
bulging mail
bags and humming fax machines. E-mail silently accumulating in an In box
does not create that pressure.

"E-mail is effective in organizing a constituency," Mr. Seiger said.
"It's uniquely ineffective in projecting the voice of that constituency.
There's no
way to create an impact in a visual way."


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