Swifting the voters

I really don't know the answer to this, but these "telemarketing ploys" are making a mockery of the elective process.

An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who “push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy” should be controlled. If your reply is “yes,” the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man.

In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists “the same legal rights and privileges” as Americans.

Using a telemarketing tactic that is best known for steering consumers to buy products, the organizers of the political telephone calls say they have reached hundreds of thousands of homes in five states over the last several weeks in a push to win votes for Republicans. Democrats say the calls present a distorted picture.

The Ohio-based conservatives behind the new campaign, who include current and former Procter & Gamble managers, say the automated system can reach vast numbers of people at a fraction of the cost of traditional volunteer phone banks and is the most ambitious political use of the telemarketing technology ever undertaken.

But critics say the automated calls are a twist on push polls — a campaign tactic that is often criticized as deceptive because it involves calling potential voters under the guise of measuring public opinion, while the real intent is to change opinions with questions that push people in one direction or the other.

The calls have set off a furor in the closing days of a campaign in which control of Congress hinges on a handful of races.

Late last week, Representative Benjamin L. Cardin, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maryland, demanded a halt to the calls, saying “this sort of gutter politics” was distorting his record. Some political analysts said the practice could mislead voters and discourage them from taking calls from more objective pollsters.

Andrew Kohut, a longtime pollster and the president of the Pew Research Center in Washington, said the automated calling “smells like a push poll, it feels like a push poll, so I guess we have to call it a push poll.”

But Harold E. Swift, one of the organizers of the Ohio group, said he viewed the move beyond phone banks or simple taped attack messages as a “very sophisticated approach to voter education.” The goal, he said, is to “make people aware of the candidate’s stand on the issues that are important to them.”

Mr. Swift said his group, Common Sense Ohio, is a nonprofit advocacy organization and is financed by wealthy Republican donors. A sister organization, Common Sense 2006, has received a donation from the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee, an affiliate of the Republican Governors Association. Under federal law, the groups are not required to disclose their donors publicly or reveal how much money they have raised.

Mr. Swift acknowledged in an interview that if some critics thought the group’s polling approach seemed deceptive, “I grant that they can reach that conclusion.”

My guess is that 99% of likely voters either don't answer to the phone or hang up after a few minutes of this nonsense. But push polls do have an effect -- just like the over the top negative ads we've seen or heard about this year -- or else they wouldn't use them. The goal is to dampen voter turnout rather than "sophisticated voter education." If faced with a choice between a Republican on the Abramoff take or a sodomite, what's a voter to do?