Capitol Watch

Pass the e-mail

by Sam Smith

If you were one of the thousands of constituents to visit www.house.gov, the official Website of the U.S. House of Representatives, anytime from August 1999 to March 2000 and used the site's convenient "Write Your Representative" function to e-mail Rep. Tom Allen, well, it was a big waste of time.

"My office recently discovered that due to a computer error a number of e-mail messages . . . were not properly processed by the computer system," reads an e-mail from Allen that was sent to the 1700 constituents who had tried to correspond with the representative through the House Website. According to Mark Sullivan in Allen's Portland office -- who says they are performing "triage" on the situation -- the e-mails all showed up at once a few months ago, and says the blame lies squarely with someone else.

"The House of Representatives offers this service," says Sullivan. "If a constituent goes to that page and sends an e-mail, House Information Resources will forward it to the appropriate member of Congress. House Information Resources did not forward those e-mails to us."

John Straub with House Information Resources, on the other hand, says the blame doesn't lie with them, it lies with the House Administration Committee. Jason Poblete, communications director for the House Administration Committee, says they're not to blame, and points the finger back at Allen's office.

"Basically what happened is the member [Rep. Allen] contracted with an outside vendor to develop software to redirect e-mails out of the Write Your Rep system and into either their Website or somewhere else," says Poblete. "That's completely within the right of the member to do that, we try to allow as much flexibility as possible, but we're basically out of it at that point. But from what I can tell, those e-mails were being redirected, somebody just wasn't opening them."

Sullivan, in LA for the Democratic Convention, was not able to return the volley, but Jackie Potter, Allen's chief of staff, tagged in, adding that, yes, in fact, the problem had started when their outside vendor, a company called ACS, had upgraded their Website and e-mail system.

The problem happened, she said, as a result of "confusion between House Information Resources and ACS."