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Phoning It InThe travesty of political robo-calls.

By William Saletan
Posted Friday, Dec. 7, 2007, at 7:59 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Now there's a lesson for you. Call firefighters lazy, and they'll leap to their phones. Or maybe, on second thought, they'll outsource the job to a computer.

Another convenience of robo-callers is that they lack human compunctions. If you can't find enough phone bankers willing to spread lies, like those that sank John McCain's presidential bid seven years ago, just record your message once. Computers will do the rest, as easily as they'll send spam, viruses, or porn. Want to call the same number again and again, to make sure the irate recipient stays home on Election Day? Want to wake people up in the wee hours? No problem. If folks complain, you can blame it on a "glitch."

A truly interactive phone call starts with a human being at the other end. You can interrupt questions, challenge premises, rephrase issues, explain your uncertainties, and add unsolicited comments. You may be ignored, but you'll be heard. On a robo-call, you can't do any of that. Last year I got phoned by the same group that's now doing the pro-Huckabee calls. "Do you support medical experiments on unborn babies?" the robot asked. "Yes," I answered. It was the only way I could protest the question's absurdity. The robot paid no attention. It simply moved on to the next topic.

In Huckabee's case, the calls begin, "This is Election Research with a 60-second political survey." Don't ask who Election Research is; the computer won't say. Don't ask it to stop calling you; it can't hear. If you track down the company's Web site and find the page where it invokes "exceptions" to the national Do Not Call registry, don't click the link; it goes nowhere. This is typical. Here's how the Billings Gazette described a voter's search for answers last year: "Her first attempt to trace a robo-call connected her to another automated message. The message told her the call couldn't be traced until she had received three calls from the same number. Next, she called Qwest, only to be told that she would need a subpoena before the company would release the name of the caller."

The natural reaction, when you get a robo-call, is to blame the politician mentioned at the outset. "I'm calling with information about Jane Smith," the caller will say. You hang up; the phone rings again; it's about Smith again. You dial 411 and demand the number for the Smith campaign. You shout at the campaign receptionist that you'll never vote for Smith again. But the joke's on you. The people who sent the robot after you don't want you to vote for Smith. And the poor receptionist can't possibly explain this to you and all the other people jamming her lines. Even a bank of Smith volunteers, working the phones all day, can't fix the damage done by a half-hour of robo-calling. They're only human.

There's one good way to defeat the robots. When they call, don't hang up. Note which candidate they're badmouthing, and vote for him. That's the kind of feedback political operatives understand. The fast learners will stop using robo-calls. The slow learners will scratch their heads and wonder what message voters were sending. Next time, maybe they'll ask.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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Comments from the Fray Editor

A popular view was that any form of robo-calls, from anyone, should be illegal, and Morganja argued that no strangers should be able to call a private number: "I should never be disturbed in my home except by friends and family. That's it. I shouldn't need caller ID." There were a number of mentions for www.StopPoliticalCalls.org (mainly from the same person, but there you go). Lolacat almost defended the practice: "I don't mind too much getting the political calls because I used to live in a state where my vote was a foregone conclusion, so I am a little flattered by the attention and by my first chance to have an impact on a national election." Otherwise the only defense was from patron002, below, and even that had its kick at the end.

Comments from the Fray

I hate when anybody calls me, but…I have to admit that I feel for Huckabee though. The campaign is small at this point, and he may not be able to pay for real individuals to call. Remember up until very recently he wasn't doing well at all. The automated version may be an affordable and realistic way to get his campaign off the ground. Personally I believe all phone calls from politicians should be illegal.

--patron002

(To reply, click here)

"Note which candidate they're badmouthing, and vote for him."

Operatives do learn pretty fast--at least by the next election. If you vote for the guy that the robo-call bad mouths, the new strategy will be to bad mouth the candidate they want to elect. This is an odd thing about the media manipulation that's been going on in politics. People have reached the point where they trust no-one, where they can't be sure what's real, and the "controversy" makes a better story than reality. Frankly, I have no idea what could change things. Even if the mainstream media did its job and reported scum spreading for what it is, no-one trusts the mainstream media anymore.

--DeaH

(To reply, click here)

If robo-calls can't be banned, why not oblige campaigns to declare their figures on spending for robo-calls? Slate could then publish lists of candidates most in love with robo-calls, raising public awareness in the form of a contest. The opponents who are victims of robo-call campaigns could supply the local press with news stories documenting these tactics. The topic would then become newsworthy and not just the object of a one-off Slate feature. TV comics would start making recurrent jokes about the practice. The effect would be to turn the perpetrators into a laughing-stock

--tsphere

(To reply, click here)

(12/11)

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