The clamor of the brave new world.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: Internet and e-mail usage of legislators - Includes related articles

It seemed like such a good idea - traditional cracker-barrel democracy with a 21st century sheen, the latest high technology hitched to an old and fundamental American tradition. But lawmakers are finding that e-mail can get mighty noisy.

Suddenly and swiftly lawmakers are connected through computers, the Internet and e-mail with a vast universe of research and information available to voters both in their own districts and from places far away.

"I keep thinking about the future," remarked Senator Bill Schroeder of Colorado last year as the Colorado legislature was just laying the groundwork for going online. "By the turn of the century almost every legislative function will be computerized in our state and everywhere else. It is coming pretty fast, and I just want us in Colorado to be ready for it."

"It's a whole new world out there," agreed Raymond Brennan, the assistant secretary of the Michigan Senate, where the membership showed an early enthusiasm for high-tech democracy, going online as early as 1992. "We have to embrace it if we expect to stay competitive."

WHAT HAVE WE GOT INTO?

But now that the new world has arrived, many lawmakers are seeing another side to the wonders of the information age, and some are wondering what they have got into. Specifically, one of the most touted advantages of electronic democracy is also its greatest burden; it keeps lawmakers connected, on a moment's notice, with the people. And the people, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them, millions of them, are sometimes a very angry bunch with a whole lot to say.

Consider this: In Nebraska a coordinated e-mail campaign last year resulted in members of the Legislature's Transportation Committee receiving hundreds of messages over a several-day period, sometimes as many as 300 messages per lawmaker a day, promoting passage of a particular bill. In response Senator Gerald Matzke complained about the "harassment and abusive practice" of inundating legislators with messages, the onslaught of which "denies other members of the public the benefits of e-mail to contact representatives." Another lawmaker, Senator Owen Elmer, was upset enough by the avalanche to go where few other lawmakers dare to tread, calling for regulation of the Internet, "at least to the extent that we prevent abuse."

In Vermont, the state education department this year abruptly shut down an Internet forum designed to discuss a new school funding reform law, after some of the e-mail respondents began sending what were described as "harsh, sometimes abusive," messages.

"I got some very angry e-mail, and not all of it was from my constituents," says Senator Cheryl Rivers, who was receiving up to 50 messages a day on the school law. One of those messages in particular was troubling, likening the law in question to Hitler's Final Solution. "It got a little out of control, and I decided I did not want to be a part of that type of discussion," Rivers said after the list serve was discontinued. "There were some people who mailed me all the time, several times a day. I could have spent my entire day answering e-mail, some of which was pretty extreme."

In California, Assemblywoman Debra Bowen, an enthusiastic backer of electronic democracy, admits to feeling overwhelmed by the amount of email she receives. "We just don't have the staff time to answer every piece of e-mail that comes into our office," says Bowen, who can get up to 50 messages a day from constituents. But the California assemblywoman may have come up with a partial solution. In January she proposed a bill that would at least reduce the amount of junk or "spam" she gets by requiring senders to attach an address or toll-free phone number that would allow recipients to get off their mailing list.

As for the rest of the e-mail, there is little Bowen can do except to wade through it: "The biggest downside to the immediacy of the Internet is that people who are e-mailing you expect an instant response," she adds. "And sometimes I just don't have the time to do that."

And who can forget the vociferous response among email and Internet users three years ago to a proposed Conference of the States? It would have brought together representatives of each state legislature in one huge seminar designed to discuss common problems. Opponents of the conference got the idea that it was all a plot to federalize the states or somehow weaken state government. Throughout the spring and summer of 1995, legislatures across the country received hundreds of e-mail, Internet and faxed messages, often written in apocalyptic language, urging them to reject participation in the conference. Much of the opposition was orchestrated by former Colorado Senator Charles Duke who said he could connect with upwards of 100,000 people in a matter of minutes to flood a legislature with a coordinated response.

By the fall of 1995, organizers of the Conference of the States decided to scale back the proposed meeting, and one reason was certainly the amount and temper of the grassroots opposition it engendered.

Such results, depending upon your point of view and your fortunes thus far with public activism, embody either the worst mass hysteria or the best citizen participation that the new electronic democracy has to offer.

IT'S HERE TO STAY

But one thing is certain: Electronic democracy is not only here to stay, it is only going to become a larger, more engulfing thing as time goes by. And the old world when lawmakers could, for the most part, deliberate quietly and without haste, has pretty much disappeared.

"This new world is a place where there are no barriers, no separations, and no moat between the legislature and the public forces," says Alan F. Rosenthal, professor of political science at the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

Rosenthal is worried about lawmakers like Nebraska's Matzke and Elmer and the roughly 700 angry e-mail messages they received. And he wonders how the modern deliberative process can withstand such high-tech pressures. "If you are a lawmaker and you get 700 messages in one day, you've got to take that seriously," he says, "whether it is orchestrated or not. It's not that these kinds of grassroots campaigns could not have taken place before now...