Normally I like to sleep in on Saturday mornings.... but lately the phone has started ringing at about 9:00 am and rings continuously all day.
It rings during dinner. It rings while I'm trying to take a bath. It rings even while I try to take a s***!
Even so, if there were a human being on the other end of the line instead of a pre-recorded message I wouldn't whine.
So I finally had to RIP the damn landline phone out and turn off the answering service. Thank God I have a cell phone.
This is what it's been like for California voters recently with the special election coming up.
Why can political campaigns do what telemarketers can't? Why can thier computers spam us after we signed up for the National DO NOT CALL list?
From the
California Voter Foundation:
Today's political campaigns are taking telemarketing to a new level through the use of pre-recorded messages featuring the voices of politicians or actors. The campaigns use computers to auto-dial voters; if a voter is not home the pre-recorded campaign message is left on the voter's answering machine or voicemail system.
Sometimes the strategy is to make the pre-recorded call at a time when the voter is not home so that the message will be left on the voter's message system. As one company that sells such services advertised during the 2002 election, "Pre-recorded calls sent to live pick-ups are not only ignored, they are intrusive. A call delivered to an answering machine in your warm and sincere voice costs a very small fraction of a direct mail piece but has many times the vote-generating ability."26 While this strategy may be effective for political campaigns, it also means that an increasing number of voters are receiving anonymous hang-ups if they answer their phones when such calls are placed.
Such practices may succeed in getting the campaign's message out, but at what cost? While it is unknown at this time whether political "voicemail spam" has a chilling impact on political participation, Congress did find, when it passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA), that:
"[R]esidential telephone subscribers consider automated or prerecorded telephone calls, regardless of the content or the initiator of the message, to be a nuisance and an invasion of privacy."
Although by law commercial enterprises are prohibited from placing pre-recorded calls, campaigns are allowed to do so because calls for noncommercial purposes are exempt under the TCPA.
PLEASE... at least the DEMOCRATS could make it a policy not to use computers to auto-dial voters with recorded messages.
If we are the party who claims to support THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY... let's make this one obvious adjustment to our campaign tactics.
I bet that a sizeable percentage of undecideds would be won over to vote for the Democratic ticket just on the basis of making this most basic gesture of courtesy and respect.