Graham one of several in Senate Luddite Caucus The South Carolina senator is just one of handful of members who don't do email.

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s complete aversion to email might be an extreme case even in the technologically antiquated Senate, where lawmakers still file their campaign finance reports on paper, but he certainly has plenty of company in the Luddite Caucus.

“I don’t use email,” said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas). “I haven’t used it since I was chairman of the Intelligence Committee and learned that any emails would be going to the Chinese and to the Russians and to the French and to the British and to everybody else, including everything I said on my iPhone.”


Now, the 78-year-old Roberts said, texting his grandson is the most frequent way he uses his cellphone.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) isn’t fond of emailing, either, blaming his resistance on his notoriously emotional personality.

“How do I communicate? Tweet, statements, tweet, statements and sometimes we put out emails on general subjects, not really to communicate with people,” McCain, 78, said in an interview. He added in jest, “Because I’m always calm and placid and never excitable so I [do] not have to worry about saying something that later I would regret.”

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), meanwhile, reports that his preferred method of communication with staff is the old-fashioned handwritten note.

“I have an iPhone and it belongs to the Senate and it’s all I use … I have [sent emails]. Not a lot,” Shelby said. “The best thing is person-to-person like I’m talking to you. To my staff, talk to them on the phone but also notes. Hand notes. I write a lot. I’ve been here a while; I’m a little older than y’all.”

The preference for face-to-face or telephone conversations is hardly based on age. A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Inhofe — who at 80 years and 112 days is the fifth-oldest senator currently serving in Congress — said the Oklahoma Republican uses email “on a regular basis and with an official Senate e-mail account.”

The second-oldest senator, 81-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley, was briefly a Twitter phenom for his off-the-cuff tweets. A spokeswoman for the Iowa Republican said he “uses email quite a bit. He uses his own Senate email account for emailing with other senators and to communicate with his staff” on everything from “policy to scheduling and from meeting arrangements to media interviews.”

At the other end of spectrum, the Senate’s likely most prolific user of technology, 45-year-old Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), said he couldn’t imagine working without email.

“Email habits? Can you imagine what my habits on digital communications are? I use Twitter, I use Instagram to communicate with constituents, I use Facebook to communicate with constituents. I do not use Snapchat and I’ve never used Tinder,” Booker said.

He added, “The best I can do on a really busy day is meet with a few hundred, maybe a few thousand constituents, but with one push of a button I can communicate with hundreds of thousands of my constituents through social media platforms.”

Graham set the chattering class atwitter over the weekend when he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he hasn’t sent a single email in his life. Ever.

“You can have every email I’ve ever sent,” he said in discussing the Hillary Clinton email controversy. “I’ve never sent one.” Graham’s office says his email avoidance isn’t a hindrance in the job. His staffers send him a text message if they need him urgently, and fellow senators can find him either on the Senate floor or via text.

“It”s a system that works for him,” a spokesman for the South Carolina Republican said. “He has his cellphone with him at all times. It’s easier to get in touch with Sen. Graham than it is our legislative director, who has about 100 emails.”

But Graham’s declaration is still surprising given his prominent position on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that deals with privacy and, yes, technology, matters. In other words, the man who won’t use email is responsible for regulating how Americans use the Internet. ‘

In fact, Graham co-sponsored the Anti-Spamming Act of 2001, which sought to criminalize “ten or more unsolicited commercial electronic mail messages to one or more protected computers in the United States.”

The email habits of lawmakers are suddenly in the spotlight after the New York Times reported that Clinton used a personal email account as her official correspondence while serving as secretary of state and stored the emails on a private server in her home.

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, said he doesn’t fault Graham for not using email. There are a lot of risks associated with firing off quick thoughts if you’re a high-level member of Congress, Shapiro said, let alone a potential Republican contender for the presidency, as Graham is.

“Many people — well not many, obviously a minority — are not on email,” Shapiro asserted. “The fact that he doesn’t put things in a permanent record, which is discoverable or could be used … I understand that.”

As for himself, Shapiro couldn’t imagine functioning in this day and age without email. “I would suffer from inefficiency,” he said. If Graham “was 20 or 30 years younger, I think it would be weird.”