Robocalls From O'Brien and Other Politicians

Robocalls cover several categories of automated, mass calling systems. Perhaps the most benign of the bunch (if there is such a thing) is the type that appears to have used by the O'Brien campaign. This is were a list of numbers in the targetted demographic or geographic area are machine dialed, and when the call is answered a prerecorded message is played. Very convenient and (importantly) inexpensive for the campaigner but terribly annoying in most cases for the rest of us.

There are other, more-insidious varieties of robocalls, and it is perhaps no surprise that they have, in general, been banned in countries like Canada and the US, and a growing list of others. Unfortunately, calls from campaigning politicians are excluded from the Do-Not-Call registry even if they are robocalls rather than if the auto-dialer connects you to a live human operator. It likely wouldn't matter in any case since the CRTC is not terribly aggressive in pursuing DNC violators, despite reports to the contrary:

According to the CRTC's rules, candidates can't ask for money or volunteers, but they can ask for votes. Auto-dialing must only be used during reasonable daytime and evening hours, and messages must start by identifying the caller as well as a mailing address and a phone number where the candidate can be reached.

None of the robocalls made during Winnipeg's civic election campaign appear to have included the candidate's campaign office address or phone number at the beginning of the message, though most candidates left a phone number at the end.

Officials with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission say they're looking into a small handful of complaints over the last couple of weeks, at least one related to robocalls made by Mayor Sam Katz as part of his re-election bid.

Katz's campaign staff say their telemarketing provider double-checked with the CRTC and was told the ADAD rules do not apply to political campaigns.

But two separate CRTC officials confirmed Tuesday that candidates must comply with the ADAD rules.

This activity is also going on in other cities because it can be so effective, such as in our biggest city, Toronto:

The company called 10,000 people in Vaughan’s Ward 3, collated from municipal electoral rolls.

• About 2,000 people “connected” and stayed on for varying periods, from a few seconds to a few minutes.

• 770 stayed on for a “sustained” period, 8 to 22 minutes.

• An astonishing 550 stayed on for a full hour, asking Del Duca questions about everything from local issues to high car insurance rates. It would be hard to achieve anything like that degree of contact through the time-honoured methods of door-knocking and doorstep-chatting.

Of course this is why they do it: it works. It works because enough people bite to make the campaign effective. This is the same reason that email spam and commercial telemarketing continue despite the fact that they annoy the majority.

There are scattered cases of worse robocalling behaviour by political campaigns south of the borders. In the 2006 and 2008 election years some people were getting upward of 10 or 20 calls per day from the candidates. Often they violated the blackout periods (such as late evening) that apply even to these DNC-exempt callers. Worse, some voters got calls in the middle of the night.

It turned out that these repeated or late-night calls were usually from opposing parties who would splice out of context or fictional messages from the other candidate in the hope that it would turn them against that candidate. By all reports it actually had that effect, since it was only later, after the election when the damage had already been done, that most of the truth came out. As far as I know this type of fraud hasn't yet occurred in Canada.

One puzzling report regarding the O'Brien robocalls is that some people claim they can't hang up on the calls:

Several recipients said they couldn't hang up and use their phones for another call once the taped message started. A YouTube video shows a man apparently trying in vain for more than 20 minutes to hang up on a telephone "town hall" meeting, basically a massive conference call featuring O'Brien.

This type of network behaviour pretty well disappeared in the 1970s when the first stored program controlled switching equipment was widely deployed. On older electromechanical switches it was indeed very possible for a caller to hold the circuit by remaining off-hook when the called party hung up. While it had valid uses -- such as going on hook on the main phone to pick it up from an extension phone in a bedroom -- it was often abused by stalkers, collection agencies and others.

I suspect that in the above report these people didn't go on hook long enough (a couple of seconds) before going off hook again, or another phone on the same line was off-hook or their phones were defective. Nowadays it is typically only 911 operators that have the required network feature to keep a line active when the other party disconnects.