Finding Fault With Logic of Congress's E-Mail Plan

FINDING FAULT WITH LOGIC OF CONGRESS'S E-MAIL PLAN
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Jeffrey H. Birnbaum]
Last month the House quietly began to make it harder for interest groups to send large numbers of e-mails to lawmakers. At the end of May, the House started to offer congressmen the chance to add an extra obstacle -- the completion of a math problem -- to their already difficult-to-penetrate e-mail systems. The purpose, officials said, was to cut down on the deluge of messages they receive.Most offices in the House are pretty impregnable as it is. Generally, before a person can send an e-mail to a member of the House, he or she must go to a lawmaker's Web site, click on "Write Your Rep," select the congressman's state, type in a Zip code that is in that state, and then fill out a form that includes name, address, city, e-mail address and phone number. And all of that must be completed before an e-mail can either be composed or sent. Even with these many impediments, lawmakers still bellyache that the torrent of e-mails they get every day is more than their staffs can handle. According to a recent study, electronic messages to the House doubled to 99 million from 2000 to 2004. In the Senate, the number of e-mails more than tripled to 83 million during the same period. So the House's managers are adding what they call a logic puzzle to the hurdles that constituents must already scale before writing e-mails to members. In addition to the Zip code test and others, the system now used by a growing number of lawmakers also asks would-be e-mailers to solve a simple numbers problem.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100691.html
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