Political Teleboosters: The New Plague

June 5th, 2006

I have had my share of problems with companies and institutions calling multiple times in a day trying to get ahold of either me or my wife, but this voting season has been the worst yet. Tomorrow is the primary election in California and I have received nearly eight telephone calls so far today with pre-recorded messages from well-known supporters of candidates and candidates themselves urging me to vote for one or the other or this way or that on a proposition.

Will it ever stop?

Of course it will stop. Sometime around June 7th when the election is over. The best part of all this is that I’m registered as a permanent absentee voter, and I’ve already mailed in my ballot. Of course, I dislike the volume of messages I’ve received so much that I wish I could have my ballot back just so I could vote against these old-school spammers.

The National Do Not Call Registry has been a success for me and my family. We have received almost no unsolicited calls since then except for the political advertisements preceding this election. You see, the politicians that drafted this bill made a nice exception for themselves making it impossible to penalize them for telemarketing. “It’s not covered because it’s not a sales call” they say. How is it not a sales call? All they are doing is trying to sell themselves and their friends.

I did a little research and found that they are most likely calling all the numbers that are registered with their political party. I am going to have to re-register and put some bogus number on there if I’m ever going to get this to stop. I can try to track down all the organizations that are using that number to boost their candidates’ numbers and ask them to please stop calling, but they are in no way obligated to do so and there are just so many that it’s not worth it.

We need a new law against this behavior. I would love to just vote against everyone who is doing this, but that is often impractical. The best candidate in most important regards is rarely the one who is not advertised through telephone solicitations. In some categories I have received calls backing all of the candidates that are running. Then what am I supposed to do? Not voting is out of the question. I have no obvious recourse available.

I can only hope that they don’t get ahold of my email address.

One Response to “Political Teleboosters: The New Plague”

  1. Spencer J says:

    Those calls make me sick. I was taking care of my little girl on Saturday and I didn’t dare answer the phone once due to the chance of it being another political call. The answering machine had five massages in four hours. One from President Bush of all people. I am so glad that July 7th is past us.

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