Today's New
York Times gives prominent play to a story
on bills working their way through various state legislatures across the
country to crack down on prerecorded campaign calls:
Nearly two-thirds of registered
voters nationwide received the recorded telephone messages, which as political
calls are exempt from federal do-not-call rules, leading up to the November
elections, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life
Project, an independent research group. The calls, often known as
robocalls, were the second most popular form of political communication,
trailing only direct mail, the group said.
The article did not address the potential impact, if any, on
automated surveys conducted using a pre-recorded script that ask respondents to
answer by typing keys of their touch tone telephones. As of January, according to
the newsletter of the
Council of American Survey Organizations (CASRO), there were already "sixteen
bills in seven different states addressing automated calls." However, as I read
the CASRO report, most of these new bills -- like the federal "do-not-call"
regulations -- do not appear to restrict calls made for the purpose of survey
research.
I thought it might be useful to ask the opinion of survey
researchers who conduct automated "interactive voice response" (IVR) surveys
for their reaction to today's Times
story.
Jay Leve is the editor of SurveyUSA,
a firm that conducts public polls exclusively with IVR. His comment:
The people who try to deceive voters, using whatever
technology, should be put in prison. Nothing is more repugnant than individuals
or firms who use technology to disenfranchise voters, which is what the calls
being debated do. Many such calls are designed to suppress turnout. They are
the 21 Century Bull Connor, with a fire-hose replaced by Ethernet.
SurveyUSA welcomes carefully drawn legislation that makes it a crime to mislead
voters, by whatever means. SurveyUSA opposes sloppily drawn legislation, in any
jurisdiction, that fails to recognize the vital community interest served by
legitimate, hyper-local public opinion research.
Thomas Riehle is a partner in RT Strategies, a firm that usually conducts
telephone surveys using live interviewers (including the polls conducted for
the Cook Political
Report). One exception was last year's Majority
Watch project, which fielded pre-election polls via IVR in contested U.S.
House races. Riehle's comment:
The research industry, under the
leadership of CMOR [the Council for Marketing and
Opinion Research], has done a good job in helping legislators and
regulators distinguish between a telemarketing program contacting hundreds of
thousands of households with sales or advertising mass-marketing messages,
which 'do not call' lists regulate, and live telephone interviews with a few
hundred or a thousand households who complete a survey research project. I
would hope that regulators or legislators intending to limit any negative impact
they might find caused by hundreds of thousands of political telemarketing
recorded calls will not unintentionally limit the ability to complete a few
hundred survey research calls using recorded-voice interviews.
As they say in radio land, our comment line is open. What do
you think?