The internet could be hailed as the best thing for democracy since the Australian ballot, empowering the masses to participate meaningfully in politics. But the house.gov web portal has taken steps to make it more difficult for issue campaigns to get off the ground and for citizens to communicate with their elected officials by filtering out what it calls “mass email”.
Most internet users are familiar with CAPTCHA, those psychedelic letter combinations at the end of a form designed to determine your humanness (and screen out the robots). Now, the House of Representatives has installed its own form of CAPTCHA on its “Write Your Representative” (WYR) site, the chief online conduit between citizens and their representatives. Check it out (try with "District of Columbia" as your State and "00000" as your zip code).
WYR’s new logic puzzle improves upon traditional image-based CAPTCHA by asking users (in plain text) to solve a simple logic problem, such as “What is nine minus one?”. Hence, no doors are closed to the visually-impaired, though some might find the need to brush up on their Kindergarten math skills. Correct completion of the puzzle gives you a voice in Congress, or at least with the intern tracking constituent concerns.
For the moment, this puts a hitch in web-based “Tell your Representative” campaigns. Traditionally, advocacy organizations have simply tapped into the House’s WYR service to submit customizable form letters on behalf of individuals to their representatives. The logic puzzle, for the time being, puts a roadblock in front of such automation.
Given the growing consensus that many in Congress are “out of touch” (as evidenced by recent polls), these measures are a step in the wrong direction. Our representatives ought to embrace efforts at streamlining constituent-representative communication. “Tell your Representative” features may give Congressional offices more constituent email to file through. But such is the small price of extending civic activism to citizens who might not otherwise go out of their way to share their thoughts with their elected officials. These are the people Congress must hear from now more than ever.
Like most e-mail users, I’m a recipient of excessive amounts of junk mail and would sympathize with House.gov efforts to screen out questionable Ugandan investment opportunities and underground Viagra deals. It’s even reasonable to withhold Congressional e-mail addresses from the public in favor of a standard “Write Your Representative” form. But the introduction of the “Logic Puzzle” represents more than a legitimate interest in filtering out irrelevant scams and solicitations; it strikes at the heart of online organizing and advocacy.
