Emails released by the Alaskan Office of the Governor last week revealed that, during her term as Alaska’s ninth governor, Sarah Palin used the “reply all” button on her gubernatorial email account over 14,350 times to disseminate her opinions on topics ranging from budget negotiations to the previous night’s episode of Dancing with the Stars. While most of the emails were text-only, over two thousand contained photo attachments of animals dressed as humans. The largest email that she sent included a 33-page piece of fan fiction inspired by the popular CBS crime procedural NCIS.
Palin’s constant and indiscriminate use of the “reply all” button, typically reserved for situations in which it is absolutely critical that each of the original message recipients receive a reply, resulted in the majority of State House staffers deciding to completely abandon their official email accounts.
On February 17, 2007, State of Alaska employees arrived at work to see that they had an email from the governor that read, “Pls pray 4 me. Had a dream last nite that Todd & I made love inside of a hollowed-out bear carcass.” The message was apparently a reply-to-all response to an email sent by Palin’s chief of staff through a state employee listserv as a reminder for everyone to watch the Governor’s first State of the State Address.
Palin sent the following email to the employees of the Department of Fish and Game in March of 2008: “Thnkng about naming my daughter’s new baby ‘Trig’, short for trigonomery (sic). todd and I fell in love when we took that class 2gether in high school. thoUghts????”
“Palin’s use of the reply-all button was actually quite innovative, “ said James Muller, Political Science professor at the University of Anchorage. “By inundating the employees of her administration with excessive emails, she disrupted communication and undercut the efficacy of her programs at every turn. This perfect storm made Palin’s the most restrained executive branch in Alaskan history.”
An email recovered from Palin's private account
New email messages not included in the 21,499 pages of electronic commucations published last week were discovered today when Alaskan officials began investigating missing emails from September 2008 through the date of her abrupt resignation 10 months later in 2009. After learning of a private email account registered to Palin (SlySarah357@yahoo.com) that was used to conduct government business, The Chicago Dope was able to access the contents of the heretofore missing emails by successfully guessing the password “youbetcha”.
A former administration official told us that the second account was created by State House staffers who grew weary of receiving Palin’s ”decreasingly coherent emails” in the wake of the defeat of her presidential ticket in the 2008 election. The account was set up to block all outgoing messages. The Governor’s husband, Todd Palin, was put in charge of managing her official account.
Attempts to reach the former governor for comment by email returned the following out-of-office autoreply: “lol, not sure what this feature does??!!”
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