Ban Robocalls

Dear newly-elected Dem majorities, not just in DC but in various statehouses:

Are you looking for a small-scale piece of legislation that will at once boost your popularity, make obviously sound, consumer-driven public policy, hurt nobody except some companies everyone hates, and-- oh yeah-- give Dems a small boost for the next election cycle?

You didn't ask me, but here it is: ban robocalls.

Robocalls, as you may know, are calls delivered by computers with automated messages. Some reach tens of thousands of households in a day. In states where robocalls are legals, campaigns often place them either to remind likely voters of a candidate's pluses and minuses, or to be sure they know there's an election. Nothing wrong with that, though the calls can annoy: they are, after all, a form of telephone solicitation, and everyone hates phone solicitors, especially computerized phone solicitors (friendly volunteers making personal calls are, when done right, another matter).

This season, as you may also know, Republicans did something new, different, and effective with their pesky auto-dialers: they sent out hundreds of thousands of deceptive robocalls in contested Congressional districts which took harassment to new levels.

These calls-- as Josh Marshall and others have documented amply-- began "I'm calling with information about [name of Dem candidate]." If you hung up, the machines would call you back, again and again. If you listened straight through, the calls would deliver a negative message: [name of Dem candidate] wants to raise your taxes, hates puppies, etc. You wouldn't learn who paid for the calls (a Republican campaign organization) until the very end.

The idea wasn't really to deliver the negative info so much as to get swing voters to associate [name of Dem candidate] with annoying repeat robocalls. It worked. It may have made the difference in a couple of races.

These calls violated federal election law, because they didn't identify who paid for the calls until the end. But the GOPers may be quite willing to pay the fines, especially since the estimated benefit to GOPers from five zillion frauduluent robocalls probably exceeds whatever fine the FEC would assess.

One state where there seem to have been fewer robocalls (though there were some): Indiana. The home of the Fever, the Pacers and the Indy 500 bans, not fraudulent calls (which require someone to prove fraud) or calls to a do-not-call list (as in New Hampshire, a rule which again requires instance-by-instance proof) but-- simply-- all robocalls, for whatever reason. All mass phone calls in Indiana must be placed by human beings. A federal circuit court appears to have upheld Indiana's law as it applies to political calls.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Dems won all three contested House races in Indiana.

Also not coincidentally, a GOP call scheme in Indiana backfired because the GOP had to hire overseas call-center types to make the calls: people with heavy South Asian accents ended up delivering anti-immigrant, anti-outsourcing scripts. Not especially effective, I'd say. If you can't get enough volunteers, or even enough Americans, to deliver a telephone message for your American campaign, maybe you shouldn't be sending that message at all.

Dems can't and shouldn't compete directly by sending out fraudulent annoying robocalls of our own. Existing laws regulating (but not banning) robocalls in most states make such calls hard to stop until it's too late. So what do you say to having your state go the way of Indiana and ban all robocalls for any reason? It would help Dems, it would be popular, and there's really no downside. If you're in Congress, consider it. If you're a state legislator, try it. If you're not, try calling-- using your own voice-- or else writing to someone who is.