Tired of political phone calls? Get on the list

By John Matarese - wcpo | email

If a political party or candidate has not called your home or cell phone yet during this election year, you should consider yourself lucky.

Republicans do it.  Democrats do it.  Independents do it.  As recent elections have had a smaller margin of votes between the winner and loser, those nagging dinnertime telephone calls endorsing a local or national candidate are becoming more common.

Residents across the nation use caller ID and answering machines to combat these calls, but one Washington D.C. man decided that enough was enough and has created a "Political Do Not Call" list.

"We get a lot of phone calls from a lot of politicians," said the list's creator, Shaun Dakin.  "And we all had registered on the federal Do Not Call list."

 Dakin says the reason why people who have signed up for the federal list banning solicitation calls are still getting political recorded messages or phone calls is because politicians and campaigns are exempt from this list.

To combat the problem, Dakin's website, StopPoliticalCalls.org, asks politicians to voluntarily stop calling members.  Since 2007, he says, 50,000 people have signed up.

Many campaigns, however, still won't honor the voluntary list.  Dakin says if campaign calls hunt you down, ask the caller to remove your name from their list and make sure your local elections officials don't have your home phone number.