Good Call

States Seek Limits on 'Robocalls' in Campaigns

State investigators here are still trying to figure out who sabotaged Scott Kleeb’s campaign for Congress last November with a barrage of automated telephone calls to voters. The unauthorized calls, officials said, distorted Mr. Kleeb’s views and even used a recording of his voice — sometimes arriving in the middle of the night — with the greeting: “Hi, this is Scott Kleeb!”

“Get rid of them,” said Stan Jordan, a Republican state representative in Jacksonville, Fla., who has sponsored a bill there. “When they first started, this wasn’t much of a nuisance. But it’s epidemic-level now.”

Some residents in Mr. Jordan’s district received 17 calls a day, he said. In the Third Congressional District of Nebraska, voters reported getting as many as 20 calls daily — many of them purportedly from Mr. Kleeb’s campaign — at all hours of the day and night.

The automated phone calls, have been popular with candidates for years because they are cheap, easy to make and often highly effective. The Federal Communications Commission has rules requiring the callers to state their identity at the beginning of the message. A spokesman, Clyde Ensslin, said the commission had taken action against violators, but it did not separate political calls from commercial ones.

State officials say the federal rules have been routinely ignored, and with the pitched battle for control of Congress in last year’s elections, complaints about the calls surged, particularly in many battleground states.

In Missouri, voters endured a blitz of automated calling during the tight Senate race between Jim Talent, the Republican incumbent, and Claire McCaskill, the Democrat who unseated him. The Missouri attorney general’s office received 664 complaints about the calls, more than any other issue in the past several years, officials said.
So far, only a few states, including Indiana, Minnesota and New Jersey, have laws restricting the calls, but more than 20 states have bills now pending. A tally compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures shows the proposals vary widely.

The Nebraska legislation would limit to two the number of automated political calls any household could receive in one day, restrict calling to 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., mandate disclosure at the outset of who was responsible for the call and indicate whether a candidate had approved the message.

In Missouri and Rhode Island, lawmakers want to establish a political no-call list. In Florida, the existing commercial no-call list would be extended to include the political calls. A bill in Michigan would prohibit early morning and late-night calls.

Too late now to get this in place for the caucuses, but we can still do this before the general election next year. Put this on your list of things to bug your legislator about this summer.