Page 3 - Contact Your Lawmakers Research

Contacting Your Member of Congress - Fact or Fiction? Research Project

For instance, many Senators represents tens of millions of constituents, with only 4 - 7 phone lines. This
means that most callers are sent straight to voice mail, which fills up after about 100 messages. Any calls
after that gets a busy signal or a message that their voice mailbox is full and to call back.

So now for the big question . . . do phone calls influence lawmaker decisions? A journalist in an article in
the New Yorker writes

“When I asked past and present Congress members and high-level staffers if constituent

phone calls mattered, all of them emphasized that it absolutely does. But when I asked them
to name a time that a legislator had changed his or her vote on the basis of phone calls, I
got, in every instance, a laugh, and then a very long pause. It’s easy to chalk that reaction

up to embarrassment, as if Congress members had been caught paying lip service to
constituents while voting in accordance with other influences: party leadership, polling,

lobbyists, interest groups, donors, or the dictates of conscience."

Two things are for certain. The increase in civic participation has exposed a major flaw: the phone system

in Washington is unable to keep up with a growing electorate that no longer trusts their representatives to

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