(Video) ABC News - Do Not Call List doesn't stop political calls

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

(ABC News 15)Link to article is here.

Posted: 07/07/2010
Last Updated: 23 hours and 52 minutes ago

By: Dan Siegel
By: Joe Ducey

WASHINGTON - As the primary elections near, expect to get robo-calls -- even if you're on the Do Not Call List.

"They just spam us into oblivion, and it's really phone spam," said Shaun Dakin, the man behind the effort to create the National Political Do Not Contact Registry .

Dakin said he's collected more than 160,000 phone numbers so far, about 5,000 of them from Arizona.

"There is no legal enforcement," Dakin said. "It's really enforcement around the candidates knowing about this list and then participating in this list."

Dakin said candidates should be free to campaign, but not to invade people's privacy.

"They can do P.R., they can do e-mail, they can have websites, they can do Twitter, they can do door-to-door canvassing, they can do many things that don’t ring a phone and wake up a night shift worker who’s desperately trying to get sleep in order to put food on the table for his or her family," Dakin said.

Both state party offices declined to go on-camera, instead issuing statements saying they would remove people from databases if they ask.

But Dakin said that won't stop all the calls because there are a number of different local and national voter lists out there, and that's why he wants to see Congress act.

"The more numbers we have, the more people that join, the more politicians will say hey, you know this is something worth listening to," Dakin said.

A Robo-Call Privacy Act is stuck in a Congressional committee.

It would, among other things, require full disclosure at the beginning of those automated calls rather than at the end.