Communicating
with
By:
According to the Office of
Legislative Services, the only way for residents of
If a resident wishes to contact his Legislator via email, he currently needs to go to the Legislature’s website, http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/ If he knows his Legislator’s name, he can use the roster available on the site to get to a webpage that allows him to fill out an online form to send a message to the Legislator. If he does not know the elected official’s name, the resident can locate him as long as he knows either the municipality or election district in which that resident lives. Fair enough. On to filling out the form…
First, one needs to check off whether he would like to email his State Senator, and/or either of his Assemblymen or both. Then he needs to input both his first and last name; these fields are mandatory and the site will not allow the message to be sent unless they are filled in. Next, the resident has to input his street address and city; again these fields are mandatory and the message will not be sent without these blanks having been completed. He then can fill in a message and click to send the message to the particular Legislators he has selected from his district.
What’s wrong with this process? First, a resident cannot send an email to a Legislator outside of his district without filling out another entire form. If he would like to send an email to Legislators from five different legislative districts, he needs to fill out five separate forms. What if he would like to send an email to every Legislator? Try 40 separate forms!
Second, residents are required to provide their names. What if a person would like to provide a whistleblower complaint anonymously or has information about corruption that he would like to share with an elected official but does not want his name involved? He cannot do so using the online form.
Third, residents are required to provide their full address. What if a person is fearful of retribution if he communicates with a Legislator about a problem he is having? For example, a resident is being unfairly treated by a mayor in a Legislator’s district and appeals to the Legislator for his thoughts. Thanks to the form, the Legislator knows the Mayor’s identity without the complainant ever sharing that information, and can pass the informant’s address on to the Mayor, much to the resident’s chagrin.
Fourth, the online form has no option to send a copy of the message to oneself. Therefore, a resident can fill out the online form and has no proof he sent the email and also has no way of referring to the email in future correspondence. A Legislator can deny ever receiving the online form and the resident has no recourse.
Every Legislator has his own
State-provided email address.
Interestingly, lobbyists and other organizations have these email addresses
and therefore do not encounter the impediments to communicating with Legislators
by email that the average
While the Office of Legislative
Services claims that “severe spam” has caused them to no longer provide the
email addresses of Legislators, how is it that a resident of
Even if there is no fix and the form is the only way to go, certainly it
could be revamped to make it more user friendly. It could provide an option for the resident
to click off that would send a copy of the message to the resident for his
records. The form could include the
names of all of the Legislators and the resident could simply click off to whom
he wishes to send the message so that the form only needs to be completed once. In addition, the name and address fields
could be made optional, allowing residents to contact officials without fear of
retribution. The only downside of making
these fields optional that I can think of is a situation in which a resident
threatens a Legislator using the form; however, in such a situation, the
resident’s online identity could be tracked, enabling him to be found by law
enforcement.
The current online form to communicate with our State Legislators by email
is fundamentally flawed and unnecessarily difficult. Either the email addresses of our State Legislators
should be made public enabling our residents to contact them via regular email
or the online form should be revamped to make communicating in such a manner
more user-friendly. If the online form
is indeed the only option available, it should be the protocol for everyone,
including lobbyists and similar organizations.
The taxpayers who pay the bills should receive the same, if not better,
email access to their elected officials.
Michael M. Shapiro, founder
of ShapTalk.com, is an attorney who resides in New Providence,