Have You Written Your Representatives This Year?

Everyone living in America is being represented on the national level by three individuals, and three individuals alone. While you may identify with the President, his appointees, or the leaders of your party in Congress, you are ultimately unrepresented by those people in the meaningful sense; if you send a letter, it will not be likely to influence their policy decisions.

Three individuals, however, will receive your letter and, at the very least, log your view and consider it as one to address publicly. Those three people are the two Senators that your state sends to the Senate, and the Representative that your district sends to the House. Do you know who your representatives are? Most people don't, despite the fact that they're the people that should be on your Christmas card list every year. Curious how to find them? Here's how:

1. Find your full zipcode via the Postal Service.
2. Input your address here to find your representatives' names and contact info

Once you've done that, you could call regularly, or compose a letter once a year to let them know what's on your mind. As a general rule of thumb, Congresspeople are able to tally up the letters received, multiply that number by 20, and then have a general number of the people who care enough about that issue and agree with those letters, to base their votes on it. This means that if you live in the state of Pennsylvania, for example, and you wanted to send a letter to Arlen Specter relating to the economy, your opinion would be magnified greatly. Specter's most recent re-election campaign won by a margin of just under 600,000 votes out of a total of 5 and a quarter million. That's a fairly safe margin, but consider if he started receiving a few thousand letters; he'd really need to pay attention to those.

Pennsylvania has around 11 million inhabitants, of whom 5 million will regularly vote on any given Presidential election season. On non-Presidential election cycles, however, perhaps 3 to 4 million will take part, tops. In those cycles in particular, Senators need to listen to the views of the politically active; the party-aligned civically unaware will usually refrain from voting, so it's all about winning over the people who care enough to vote every time they get the opportunity. Those are exactly the same people who would send letters regularly to their congresspeople, and it's those people whose views are magnified by the assessment of the worth of letters. A few thousand of those letters might not seem like a lot of votes, but consider if he were to receive 10,000 letters prior to the 2010 election cycle; he'll want a comfortable margin, and those 10,000 letters would point to a possible bloc of 200,000 votes in a cycle when that's getting close to 10% of the total. Any election analyst will tell you that if you can secure 10% of the voters by championing a single issue that doesn't interfere with the general public sensibilities, you are almost guaranteed the victory.

When you look at House Representatives, the numbers are even better. People are less aware of the House than of the Senate, so letters that are received are treated with even greater respect, and this is compounded by the fact that there are far fewer voters in those districts (by definition, they're organized around centers of 500,000+ inhabitants, of whom 300,000 regularly vote in Presidential cycles and 100,000-200,000 will vote regularly). As such, tighter margins mean that smaller blocs are courted more regularly, so as few as 1,000 letters will be enough to secure attention to the cause.

Most people have some issue that they care about greatly. What's your issue? Have you written your three representatives about your view in order to convince them to represent you more fully? It is never a waste of time, and you might very well be surprised at what can happen if you get your friends and family, too, to send a letter at least once a year.

Just sayin'.