Frequently Asked Questions

When did it shut down?

I officially shut down ElectedNet! on November 5, 2020, but the data had been slowly getting out of date for about two years before that.

Why did you shut it down?

ElectedNet! was originally meant to be an easy means of contacting your representatives directly and in groups. As representatives moved toward using web forms instead of email addresses to take comments, there was less and less point to having a central search site. Every once in a while the format of the data changes, and then it takes work to update the data transfer. That work is no longer justified by the benefits the site provides.

Older questions

Where does this information come from?

White House information I add by hand, myself. The House of Representatives and the Senate come from the House and Senate web sites. I automatically update from those pages once a month.

Why no e-mail addresses?

I’ve recently changed from Grace York’s text file (which is no longer available) to pulling the data directly from the House and Senate. They don’t provide e-mail addresses, so I no longer have e-mail addresses in my database. It doesn’t really matter. In the last build I pulled from Grace’s file in 2008, out of 440 House members, only 26 provided public e-mail addresses. Out of 100 Senators, only 5 provided public e-mail addresses. If you want to contact your rep, use their web form, see them in person, or help the quasi-governmental Post Office stay afloat by sending snail mail. On the plus side, I do now provide phone numbers for Senators, if you want to use some of your free minutes talking to Washington.

Did the URL change recently?

Yes. After about ten years, I redesigned my site in November 2006. Any links should be automatically redirected—with search terms intact—to the new page. But you’ll want to update your links to reflect the new URL, which should last for at least as long as the old URL did. Basically, remove “enet.cgi” from the end of the URL and remove “html/” from the beginning of the URL’s path.

Why did so few representatives provide public e-mail addresses?

You really need to ask your representative this, but most likely the answer is spam. A lot of people all over the web are switching from e-mail to web forms in order to avoid wading through too much spam. You’ll be hard-pressed to find my e-mail address on this site, for example, and the one you do find gets so much spam you might not get through to me.

Why not add an “e-mail everyone” link?

ElectedNet is meant to be a means for you to contact your representatives with your concerns. It is not meant to be a means of spamming people you don’t know. You are perfectly welcome to choose each and every representative, but you’re still going to have to choose them consciously. You have to know who you’re e-mailing to.

Why do we have to use our own e-mail client?

Because your mail is likely to have more impact if it comes from you rather than from me. If I set ElectedNet to send all mail from my server, that’s going to be something that your representatives can recognize. And they’ll end up paying even less attention to your mail than they already do.