Comment by codingdave 8 days ago
Signing a letter is fine, but will not have the same impact as phone calls made to your representatives.
https://5calls.org/why-calling-works/
You don't need to use that site - the point is that if you want to have the loudest voice, make some calls.
To be clear, not necessarily sentiment analysis of the email (the pre-LLM kind, like are they angry, aggressive, etc.); but sentiment tally about voting on the legislation, like a phone operator might do, which might only be identifying which bill/issue is being talked about, and whether "vote for" vs. "vote against".
The limitations of that is part of why I suggested that following up with review of the email by a human later, for nuance. The other part is so they know they're reaching a human at their representative's office, not just talking to a machine.
I don't know much about politics other than Sorkin-esque TV dramas, but the original Web page said that timely tallies could help a politician avoid being in the situation of having to walk back a stated position on something. So I'd guess that's one way a real-time tally could still be very valuable, and I think an LLM is up to the hard parts of it.
Ok, say I call. What do I say: "Hey I want to show my support for the Big Beautiful Bill because it reverses the tax deduction for software engineers."
And then what? (asking honestly lol for anyone who's done this before)
Say whatever you feel. They will listen to you and sort it out into support or opposition to current legislative efforts. You don't have to have a perfect script - just tell them what you think. But I would caution you to talk about the issues you care about, not telling them you support a specific bill. Because they need to know what issues you care about so that when legislators propose changes to the bills (which always happens), they know whether those changes are aligned with what they are hearing from the people. You'll note that the letter OP linked to does not say that it supports the bill - it supports a specific change they want to be prioritized.
For clarity, the issue at hand is the “Big Beautiful Bill” does NOT reverse the tax treatment. The request here is to change the bill to reverse the current treatment.
> Other kinds of messages take longer. Emails have to be manually read and sorted. Faxes have to be digitized and emailed. [...] By contrast, congressional staffers tally phone calls right away.
Golly. Is this a problem? Hasn't this been solved already? Do they want to solve it? How much do they want to solve it, in terms of United States Dollars?
This is now easy for many HNers to build, with the hard parts now done by free off-the-shelf components.
The customer could have those email tallies even faster than the phone staffer tallies, for the timely read on constituents that the 5calls.org Web page suggests.
And then they can manually or semi-manually review the emails later, for nuance and genuine responses. But they got the important tallies immediately, on their live dashboard and timely alerts.
(But keep those human staffers answering phone calls, since I'd guess that AI on phone there would alienate the very engaged voters who still make phone calls.)