Turning Robocalls into a Contest

Monday, December 15, 2008

(Congressional Quarterly)

Dec. 15, 2008 – Page 3312

By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff

He tried, without much luck, to persuade politicians to quit sending the automated telephone campaign pitches that clogged the nation’s answering machines this year. Now Shaun Dakin is trying to shame them with a contest for the worst and weirdest “robocalls” of 2008.

“I hold out hope that if we can keep focus on it, politicians will do the right thing,” says Dakin, a marketing and management consultant in Falls Church, Va., who started a national political “do not contact” registry in April 2007 and founded the group Citizens for Civil Discourse. Dakin insists that robocalls annoy voters more than they affect their voting. Even so, only two sitting House members signed Dakin’s no-robocall pledge this year, and one of them, Democrat Nancy Boyda , lost her seat in Kansas.

Dakin says he hopes the contest will help him recruit more participants in 2010. Relying on a network of what he says are 85,000 supporters, he has collected recordings of about 100 robocalls from the campaign. He narrowed the list to the eight worst and five weirdest.

Although Republican presidential candidate John McCain took the most heat for his robocalls this year, Dakin says he and Democrat Barack Obama both made prolific use of automation. Three McCain calls are nominated in the worst category, including one linking Obama to 1960s radical Bill Ayers and another that claimed in Spanish that Obama was the preferred candidate of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The president-elect made the worst list with two spots that accused McCain of neglecting the interests of the middle class.

More fun are the calls on the roster of the weirdest. The current front-runner is one by Zane Starkewolf, a Republican House candidate in California who ran against Democrat Mike Thompson in the Napa Valley. A seductive female voice greeted voters with the declaration that “Mike Thompson has been a bad boy,” followed by a more urgently passionate cry, “Vote ‘yes’ for Zane.”

Dakin’s honorees will get an automated phone call of their own as a prize, but it won’t be too over-the-top. “We will follow all applicable laws and regulations and our own best practices,” Dakin says.