Email addresses for legislators? about congress-legislators

[konklone]

It would be! You're definitely not the first to ask about it. I wish there were direct email addresses for members of Congress, but there are very few. Mostly, your only choice is to use their contact form to send them electronic writing.

To be honest, my understanding of how this stuff works in Congress is that you make a much bigger impact calling than sending a contact-form/email submission. Others on this project may feel differently, but if you're building a system to try to communicate the public will to Congress, I would focus on driving people to call rather than write.

[JoshData]

if you're building a system to try to communicate the public will to Congress, I would focus on driving people to call rather than write.

The question of effectiveness of calls versus letters is murky. Letters are much more likely to be tallied, afaik.

[leftstandingup]

With regards to Members' direct email addresses, there is no way to know the address they use for their mail. They don't have regular email addresses the way staffers do - just think how flooded they would get with constituents writing in their opinions. They would never be able to sort through all that mail to get to the stuff they actually need to read and receive. But the letter and phone call counts absolutely do get reported to the Members, and they take those numbers seriously. So keep calling, keep writing, keep making your voice heard on the issues that matter to you.

I can't speak to legislators' offices at all levels, but for Congress, there is really no difference between sending a letter and making a call, except that letters will get a response and calls obviously won't. But in terms of their effectiveness and making the Member aware of your concerns, they are really identical. Also, the difference between sending an email and sending a hard copy letter is nonexistent for most offices, as the hard copies will be scanned into the computer system anyway. A Member or staffer can look to see whether its an email or a letter, but only if they want to bother making that effort and there is really no reason for them to do that. Hard letters and emails will get the same responses.

[kamranayub]

Thanks for the advice! I'm just making a real simple app to display the data from these dumps (+ maybe a couple other APIs) to make it easy for people to figure out who represents them.

The only thing is that I can't figure out where to get the state house/senate information via an API, but I haven't looked too deep into that.

[konklone]

You'll want to check out the Open States project. They have an API and bulk data for lots of things, for all 50 states + DC + PR.

[kamranayub]

Beautiful, thank you! I'll check it out. I really like the bulk download for easy offline caching.

[konklone]

Yep, just bear in mind that their bulk downloads generally lag behind their API content. To quote their bulk downloads page:

These downloads are not intended as a replacement for using the API. The main deficit you'll notice is that they lag up to a month (but usually not more) behind the current data. This makes them useful for general research purposes or initializing a database that will then be kept up to date via regular calls. If you'd like more current data please use the API.

[kamranayub]

Thanks, I just discovered that Sunlight Labs bases their API off of this repo... so even better! I can make use of both Open States and Congress APIs to do what I need. It doesn't appear that the Open States API provides phone/fax/website information though.