You'd Think That There "Internet" Would Have Made Interaction with Political Candidates Easy

But you might be wrong.

I'm contacting candidates for US Senate and US House of Representatives to ask them to sign The MITE's candidate pledges.

I just finished contacting US House candidates from Mississippi's 1st District.

The Republican incumbent's web site included a contact email address. Nice (you might be surprised at how difficult SOME incumbents make it for anyone who's not a constituent to contact them).

The Democratic challenger's Internet presence seems to be entirely on Twitter, so I was able to "direct message" him.

To reach the Libertarian challenger, I ended up having to go to ICANN's "whois" utility to find an email contact address based on his web site URL (the site itself consisted of one blog post and didn't seem to feature any contact information.

It's barely possible to tell from search engines, etc. that the Reform Party and Veterans Party candidates even exist, let alone how to go about contacting them.

So, a contact success rate of 60% for that district. And personally, it is the third party and independent candidates I rate most likely to pay attention to The MITE ... if I can reach them. Depressing.

Thank God for Politics1 -- without it the work would be even more difficult. Most of the web sites operated by state election authorities don't seem to include contact information or even web site URLs for candidates in their publicly available listings.