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New Evidence on the Prevalence of Robo-Calls

Turns out, our strenuous coverage of the robo-call issue during the mid-term elections was unnecessary: if you're a voting American, you likely experienced robo-calls first hand!

A new poll by the Pew Internet and American Life project says 64% of registered voters received at least one robo-call during election season. From Pew's brief summary:

These so-called “robo-calls” were the second most popular way for campaigns and political activists to reach voters, trailing only direct mail as a key tool of political communication. Some 71% of registered voters got direct mail campaign solicitations, while 24% received phone calls from real human beings urging their vote for a particular candidate, 18% were visited at their homes, and 14% received email solicitations.

As TPMmuckraker notes, we still don't know how many people received the harassing robo-calls that called six, seven, or eight times in a row, in a GOP ploy to discourage Democratic turnout.

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 12/21/06 at 11:37 AM | E-mail | Print | Digg | de.licio.us | Reddit | Newsvine | Yahoo! MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Netscape | Google |