Reporters who went digging through a federal docket in 2017 kept turning up the same scene. Somebody's full name and street address, timestamped, sitting under a paragraph written in the confident register of a person with settled views on telecommunications policy. Phoned at home, the person had no settled views on telecommunications policy and had never heard of the proceeding.
Public comment is the one place in American rulemaking where an ordinary person is invited to speak into the record before a decision lands. It is deliberately open: no credential check, no residency requirement, nothing between a resident and a docket except a web form. That openness is the feature. It is also the reason a comment file can fill with people who never wrote anything.
A docket is not a poll
The confusion starts with what people think the box is for. Most of us picture a tally: the agency counts what came in, the bigger pile wins, and a campaign that mobilises more supporters carries the day. Advocacy groups reinforce it every time they ask you to add your name.
Agencies say otherwise, plainly. The Environmental Protection Agency's guidance for commenters states that the process is not a vote, and that one well-supported comment is often more informative than a thousand form letters. What an agency owes the public is a response to significant and relevant points, not a scoreboard. A reasoned objection nobody else made can change a rule. Ninety thousand identical paragraphs change one line in the response document.
Which makes a flood of fabricated names stranger, not less strange. If the count decides nothing, why manufacture one? Because the count decides the coverage. Millions of entries generate headlines, hearing questions, and a story about public sentiment, and that story runs whether or not anyone wrote them.
What the New York investigation counted
The largest documented case is now a matter of public record. In May 2021 the New York Attorney General published a report on the 2017 net neutrality proceeding, after an investigation into where its comments came from. More than 22 million comments had been filed. The office concluded that nearly 18 million of them were fake.
| Slice of the docket | Scale |
|---|---|
| Total comments filed | More than 22 million |
| Found to be fabricated | Nearly 18 million |
| Impersonating real people | More than 8.5 million |
| Fake letters sent to Congress | More than 500,000 |
The impersonations were funded by a broadband industry campaign and produced by lead generation firms, three of which later paid more than 4.4 million dollars in penalties and disgorgement. The opposing side was not clean either: roughly 9.3 million entries supporting net neutrality carried invented identities, most of them from one nineteen year old running automated software. The same investigation traced a million more fake comments and 3.5 million fake digital signatures across over a hundred unrelated campaigns. This was a supply chain with customers, not one bad quarter at one agency.
Where the fake names came from
The mechanism explains why those phone calls were possible at all. Lead generation firms hold enormous files of names, addresses and email addresses gathered from sweepstakes entries, free trial offers, quiz pages and coupon sign-ups. Every record was surrendered for something small and unrelated, and none of those people agreed to appear in a federal docket.
Nothing exotic converts a marketing list into public testimony. The comment form asks for a name and accepts what it is given, because verifying identity would exclude exactly the people the process exists to hear from. A tenant without a driver's licence, a worker without a fixed address, and a person who declines to hand over documents all have standing to comment. The form is permissive on purpose.
That is the trade nobody states out loud. Any check strong enough to stop bulk impersonation also filters out real residents at the margins, the same tension that appears whenever access is gated by an identity requirement.
The agency was never counting anyway
The reassuring part is that the fraud aimed at the wrong target. A rule stands or falls on the reasoning in the record, and a docket stuffed with duplicated sentences adds no reasoning at all. Reviewers sort for substance, and the substance in eight million identical filings is one argument, already answered.
The damage lands elsewhere. On the people who did write something of their own and now sit inside a pile the press calls compromised. On the officials who cite comment volume in hearings. On everyone who had to prove a negative about words published under their name. And every scandal like this makes the next agency a little readier to treat public input as noise, which is the outcome no lead generation contract could have bought directly.
What a machine now reads first
Volume changed how comments get processed. The EPA has published that it may use artificial intelligence to flag substantive comments, separate the arguments inside them, and group those points by theme for staff, with people still supervising the sorting and the responses.
Disclosing that is the right call, and it changes what a useful comment looks like. A filing built around one clearly stated claim, evidence attached, survives a topical sort intact. A letter that buries its point in the fourth paragraph may be summarised into something the writer would not recognise.
Filing one comment that survives the sort
Pick a proposal that touches something you actually know: a permit near your street, a benefit rule you administer, a standard you work under. Then write it this way.
- Say what you are and how you know. Sixteen years driving that route, or eleven years processing those applications, is evidence the agency can get nowhere else.
- Name the specific provision. Cite the section or paragraph you are addressing. A comment tied to a numbered clause is far harder to sort into a general sentiment bucket.
- Bring one fact with its source. A dated measurement, a photograph, a case count from your own records. Assertions without support are the easiest thing in the pile to set aside.
- Propose the alternative. Opposition with no substitute leaves the agency with one option. Describing a workable second path is how a comment turns into a paragraph of the final rule.
- Write your own sentences. Signing a supplied template merges you into a block that gets one collective answer. Six original sentences outrank six hundred copied ones.
- Keep your copy and the receipt. Save the confirmation and your dated text. If your name turns up on something you did not write, that file is what you have.
Twenty minutes of that beats adding a signature to a total nobody was tallying.
Reading the next comment-count headline
When a figure gets reported as evidence of public opinion, ask three things first. Whether anyone audited the identities behind it, since duplicate addresses and impossible submission rates are detectable and somebody has usually looked. How many distinct arguments the pile contains, because that is the number with any bearing on the decision. And who paid for the volume, given that the receipts in the New York case were itemised.
The box is still worth using. It is one of the few channels where an unelected resident puts something on a permanent record an agency is obliged to read. Filling it with ghosts damages that, and the repair is not a stricter form. It is more people writing sentences only they could have written.