GovTrack.us Blog

The New York Times has an interesting flash application that breaks down the text of yesterday’s Democratic debate (there was a debate?) by speaker and shows visually the distribution of who spoken when through the debate. They took the transcript, made it visual and interactive, and the end result is a vastly different view onto the debate than anyone had before.

One can’t help but notice that the different candidates are not getting the same amount of speaking time. Clinton spoke more than 3.5 times more words, and the same for speaking time, than Biden. For that matter, basically so did the moderator, who held the floor for more time than anyone but Clinton. It’s no wonder that Clinton is considered “the Democrat to beat” considering she’s in our face more.

If the numbers weren’t so vastly different between the candidates, we’d chalk it up to some random variation that happens from debate to debate. But, from the numbers, the speaking times are clearly planned. It’s so clear that I feel like maybe I missed something. Is it common knowledge that the debates are proportioning time out to the candidates based on their poll numbers (or something equivalent)? It’s not just that the front-runners are getting more time. The statistical correlation is ridiculously high (speaking time versus FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. Oct. 23-24: r=.96). That is, the debate organizers are basically using this formula to determine how much time each candidate should get:

Speaking Time = 8:26 minutes + 25 seconds * Latest Poll Number (%)

Of course, debate organizers can’t control exactly how long each candidate talks for, but the candidates only deviated from the formula by at most two minutes and twenty seconds (Biden, who spoke less, and Edwards, who spoke more).

It just occurred to me that with some 500 people per day viewing GovTrack’s homepage, and since I don’t post site news all that often, maybe others would like to join me and blog legislation-related news and information (like I used to do in 2006) on the front page of the site? If you’re interested, drop me an email at the address at the bottom of the site.

Totally not useful to anyone, but I thought I’d share— I’m confirmed attendee #9 to a conference in December, and #10 is a hero of mine, to the extent I have any heroes. Can’t wait.

Just added a new feature: high-resolution district maps that can be downloaded (and printed), with no unreasonable copyright restrictions. To get the maps, find the district map, as on this page, and look below the map for download options. The downloadable maps use street data from The Open Planning Project, which is (incredibly) made available with the only restriction that if you copy the map, you provide credit back to them. Since we add the district outline overlay here, to copy these maps you have to credit both GovTrack and TOPP.

This lecture by lawyer-professor Lawrence Lessig addresses some simple policy issues that were gotten wrong by Congress, and what role money had in the failure of Congress to see the whole picture. As with any Lessig lecture, it’s quite good. Here, he is setting the stage for the problem and who needs to do something about it (hint: not Congress).

(Hat-tip to Ellen Miller’s blog at Sunlight for the link.)

As a politically active citizen, you may have noticed that GovTrack seems to be missing the usual one-click Contact Your Congressperson tool, instead referring you from people pages here to the home pages of official websites at the House and Senate. Yesterday, I (Josh) attended a conference in D.C. on Communicating with Congress. (I was pretty sick yesterday, esp. by the end of the conference, and was probably fairly incoherent to those I talked to after…)

Two things that I learned stood out, and this goes to why I don’t provide such a tool here.

First, congressional offices are ridiculously overloaded with communication with the public. 313 million emails came into Congress in 2006 (iirc), which if you do the math (because I forget if anyone gave the exact number) is in the ballpark of 300-2000 emails per office per day. And given the current office budgets allowing for just a few people (in the House) to be dedicated to dealing with communications like that, there is no way, as passionate as they are about it (which also became quite evidence both from the staffer panelists and those that were in the audience), for them to respond to all communications. As a result, what we see on the outside — web forms, sometimes CAPTCHAs, limiting communication to constituents, and other barriers, are a means for them to triage the bombardment of letters they get. If they can’t deal with it all, they prioritize the letters that the writer took the most effort to create — e.g. personally written letters. That’s a very reasonable technique to me. (Though perhaps they should pass a resolution to up their office budgets?)

The second thing was that, as panelist Alan Rosenblatt presented, the method of triage has unintended ramifications. He put the point quite well: Members of Congress rely on their staffers to do research and craft public statements, and in the same way, Americans rely on advocacy groups to do research and craft letters to politicians. There’s nothing wrong, he said, with sending a pre-written letter, and it shouldn’t be discounted as it is today. And as another panelist showed, less than 10% (he later said 20%+ as a guess, but the numbers on the slide indicated otherwise) of those who participate in a letter-writing campaign modify a pre-written letter.

I got in under the wire with the last question of the day, which went effectively unanswered. I should have started with this: There seem to be three ways to deal with the problem of overloaded communications staffers (”LC”s?). One way is to increase the barriers to communication so they get fewer letters, eliminating the least important ones (as they see it). Another way is to streamline the process, which goes along the lines of what Rob Pierson suggested for a computerized, standardized (XML) letter submission format. But there is a third way, which is what I suggested, which is looking at other forms of communication entirely, to complement individual letter writing, that deal with more constituents at once. Clearly, to the extent that it makes any sense at all, dealing with communications that are sent collectively by citizens is more efficient than dealing with the same letter sent individually. There are many forms of many-to-one, aggregated communication, and I would sincerely like to know more about what Members think of those methods and whether the problems with those methods are technologically addressable.