TMCnet Feature

The phone rings and instead of a person on the other end, it's a recording. The familiar voice is a politician asking you to vote. Political campaigns have spent millions on pre-recorded calls to the home phones of America persuading them to vote. Now, with the 2012 campaign for President and Senate, those calls are starting to be made to cell phones, too.

Recently, the atlantic.com reported that Hugh Hewitt is getting complaint emails from listeners on his talk-radio show about recorded phone calls.  Hewitt said that studies show when you get six calls, with the seventh call, you're more likely to vote.

If you are frustrated over the minutes you just lost listening to a political pitch and even have signed up and placed your name on the Do Not Call Registry, those calls aren't going to stop. Nonprofit groups, survey companies and political campaigns are exempt from this registry, and a campaign may have no way to determine that the number they're dialing is a cell phone.

Part of the problem is that one-third of Americans have dropped their home phone lines and only use a cell phone, therefore, it is the only number to give out.

Politicians use cell phones to work the system to make as many of these cheap and easy contacts as they like. According a tbo.com article, nothing is going to prevent candidates from calling your number.

Federal rules even require the pre-existing relationship before a computer can automatically dial a cell phone number, but modern campaigns have ways around this rule. Democrat and Republican campaigns can enlist volunteers to make calls. The volunteer simply signs up online and the campaign provides a list of phone numbers or even makes the connection between the caller and the recipient. The law then sees it as one person calling another person.

Even you were a motivated citizen wishing to file a complaint, you would need to identify who made the call: a candidate, a political action committee, a SuperPAC, a nonprofit. Modern caller ID blocking can make this impossible because the cell phone screen may appear blank or display "unavailable."

The Federal Communications Commission is aiming to address this problem, but there are complicated reasons that give the upper hand to those campaigning for office. Because campaigns and elections have a short lifespan, by the time a penalty is imposed Election Day may have come and gone.