| (by Mike Caulfield)
 Supporters of Mike Huckabee appear to be calling the New Hampshire Do-Not-Call list with prerecorded robocalls, an offense that under New Hampshire state law can carry a fine of up to $5,000 per call.
(If you have been recently robocalled, please click the graphic to the right and report the call in our simple form).
This just in from a friend:
Michael:
I got an automated call this morning from a group called "Common Sense Issues" which was clearly a push poll for Huckabee. If you selected preference for a candidate other than Huckabee, it gave an automated negative response for that candidate, then a positive response/question ("Did you know...?") for Huckabee.
I spoke with the secretary for Jim Kennedy in the State Attorney General's office who said she had just received one other complaint today and that she had detailed the nature of the poll. She assured me that "Jim would be very interested and would get back to me" to discuss.
It gets more interesting though. My wife tells me that she got a similar call yesterday, but hung up when it only let her select from Republicans:
It very well could have been [a robo-pushpoll last night]. They asked if I was Evangelist... but I didn't hit the button for any candidate so I don't know what they would have said if I had done that.
The new method seems to be being used in Iowa, and in the Senate race in New Mexico. It has been denounced by Huckabee himself.
When pressed about the legitimacy of the calls in Iowa, the group claimed claimed they were doing nothing wrong:
Davis said the polls are used to both educate listeners but also gather information for the group itself. Each listener gets a slightly different experience based on the answers they give to initial questions.
The problem? If that call my wife got was from Common Sense Issues, then they are breaking New Hampshire Law. And it could get very expensive for them, as the Republicans found out last election:
Martha Child, an independent who generally votes for Democrats, said she received five calls from the National Republican Congressional Committee in two days despite having her number listed on a federal do-not-call list. Under state law, delivering prerecorded political messages to numbers on any federal do-not-call list is punishable by a fine of $5,000 per call.
Jim Kennedy, an election law attorney in the attorney general's office, said it doesn't matter where a group is located or who is making the calls -- if they are being made to New Hampshire residents, they are illegal.
I'm guessing the name Jim Kennedy sounds familiar there, right?
That's the person who sent me the first email is talking to about his experience.
Things are about to get very interesting here. We'll keep you updated as this develops.
In the meantime, help us out. If you get a political robocall, do not hang up (and yes, I've now informed my wife of this too). Come to this site and enter it in the Huffington Post Been Polled form (the button is on the left side of this page). Enter in the info regarding the call as best you can so we can track patterns across the country. Then, if you are in New Hampshire and on the Do-Not-Call list, contact the State Attorney General's office and let them know that you have been robocalled.
UPDATE: My wife just googled the code on the caller ID (SP 07). She found this at nielsenhayden.com --
...just got a push-poll with a voice-activated robot-voice recording thingie, asking me if I were going to vote in the Republican primary. It went on from there, asking me if I knew that Giuliani was pro-abortion would it make me less likely to vote for him? And if I knew that Huckabee was for lower taxes would I be more likely to vote for him? And so on. It was all pro-Huckabee, anti-Giuliani.
I answered "yes" or "no" pretty much at random at first, then switched to all "no" answers, just to see where it would go. No human being was involved on the other end of the line. (Hey, Huckabee guys! This kind of nonsense makes it less likely that I'm going to vote for your clown!)
No candidate name was given at the end, revealing who paid for this particular push-poll. It was something like "Paid for by Public Survey 07. 703 378-2990." (That is the real number the call came from. The area code is Arlington, Virginia.) I believe that failing to reveal the candidate the push-poll favors is illegal under New Hampshire law.
The site has the full transcript of the call. It's pro-Huckabee calls.
We are on the Do Not Call List.
Someone is about to get a lot poorer. |
