When I wrote my book, A Broken Sausage Grinder; Is Our Government Fundamentally Flawed?, I mentioned the way some elected officials approach their responsibilities. My experience was that after winning the election the voters really didn’t want to talk all that much about issues we were facing in the city. Other elected members took the stance that they would do what they thought was right personally and the voters would grade their efforts during the next election. It was all very troubling because I wanted to do a good job as the elected representative of my constituents in the City of Issaquah.
I have been very critical of our Senators and Representatives in Washington, DC for taking the money from factions and representing the factional interests in the laws and regulations under their consideration. I wondered about the problem our elected representatives face when they want to learn more about how their voters might feel on a particular subject so I obtained a copy of the voter list for my Congressional District.
My Congressional District should be similar to others around the country because our Congressional Representatives are apportioned by population. So, there will be differences between your Congressional District and mine, but those differences shouldn’t change the way we would have to go about representing our constituents if we were to find ourselves being elected so let’s imagine that we won the election to become a United States Congressional Representative. To make our victory even sweeter, let’s imagine that we won the election on a write-in vote so there was no campaigning and no fund raising and no baby kissing or speech making or promising anything at all. Our constituents elected us because they thought we would do a good job of representing their interests in the United States House of Representatives, but what are their interests?
We have a general idea how they think on a lot of issues, but we aren’t totally comfortable with all the things we could be facing in the upcoming session so we need to do some outreach and get the voters to tell us what they have in mind.
My Congressional District has just over 248,000 registered voters! Clearly a doorbell effort is out of the question because there isn’t enough time or shoe leather to learn much of anything. Town hall meetings will be part of the effort, but how will we break down the voters into groups that will fit in some of the meeting rooms spread throughout the district? My Congressional District has 430 precincts! And, some of those precincts have over 1,100 voters! Where are the meeting rooms that could handle those kinds of crowds? I have big cities and small towns in my Congressional District and that might change the views of voters as would the rural character of other parts of the district.
When the United States Constitution was written the number of Representatives in the House of Representatives was apportioned to each state at the rate of one Representative for approximately every 30,000 citizens. If we think about the complications relating to communications and travel methods of those times, it would have been tough to read the pulse of 30,000 citizens. Our communications and travel capabilities have improved when compared to colonial times, but staying in touch with 248,000 citizens is well more than a full time job.
It is clear to me that we will need to use internet, email and phones as the primary means of outreach because face-to-face gatherings with all of our constituents is simply out of the question. We can use the face-to-face format as a way to confirm some of the opinions we are hearing develop around the district. I tried to do something like this while I was on the City Council of Issaquah and found it to be pretty complex even at that level. First of all, most of the citizens don’t take the time to communicate their feelings unless they are really unhappy about something. Put another way, happy voters are quiet voters. Unhappy voters are often unhappy about things that are not on the docket for consideration so we need to keep track of those opinions for future use.
It will be necessary to use some form of statistical analysis in an attempt to extrapolate the things we learn from small groups to the overall district we represent. Statistics are powerful when used objectively, but we need to be careful not to let personal prejudices skew the outcome.
In my training, correspondence should be answered in kind and quickly. So phone calls are worthy of return phone calls and emails are answered with emails, etc. Two or three days should be the window of time it takes to respond to correspondence so we will often be responding to simply say that we received the message and will have more to say at a future time. We can respond to groups of people, but we should be careful not to let our response start to look like a form letter because that will convey a message of insincerity and will not be well received.
If your head isn’t swimming yet, it should be because doing a good job of representing the interests of 248,000 constituents is really hard work. And imagine the work involved being a Senator where every voter in your State is one of your constituents. Done well, these elected positions are incredibly demanding and rewarding in ways that are beyond imagination – done badly and you get what we’ve got.
The Sausage Grinder is Broken – will you help to fix it?
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