Politicians in the USA regularly send voters recorded message phone calls before elections – these are called ‘RoboCalls’. Your phone rings, you pick it up and you hear a recorded message asking you to vote for their party, or telling some home truths about opposing candidates (RoboCalls are often used for negative campaigning). Some will ask you to respond by pressing buttons on your phone to let them know the issues you are concerned about.
Many feel that the situation got out of hand during the last Presidential elections, with some people receiving 10 – 15 RoboCalls a day. A political party can now pay as little as 3p to make a RoboCall, and the introduction of new technologies may reduce this to below 1p. For a political party, this is significantly cheaper than any other form of leafleting or advertising.
In 2008 the Liberal Democrats were given a warning by the Information Commissioner for making quarter of a million illegal Robocalls, though if they had worded their script differently, their calls would have been perfectly legal. Now that UK political parties have access to this technology, we are concerned that they will find a way to use it.