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John McCain's Campaign Robots Hit the Phones

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

John McCain's campaign appears to be using robocalls at three times the rate that Barack Obama's campaign is, according to anecdotal evidence collected by Shaun Dakin, an anti-robocall activist in Virginia.

The McCain campaign has launched 12 different robocall campaigns within the past month and a half compared to four for Barack Obama, according to data Dakin compiled.

The McCain campaign placed the calls to voters in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin. Obama's campaign called voters in Kansas and Missouri.

The calls come as Obama outspends McCain on television ads, which political professionals say is still the predominant medium for influencing voters' opinions.

A recent poll updatefrom the electoral projection site FiveThirtyEight seems to buttress Dakin's argument that robocall campaigns don't do much to influence voters. In the past month, Colorado and Virginia have started to poll more favorably for Obama than McCain, reports FiveThirtyEight's Sean Quinn.

And a survey of voters who received robocalls in Iowa and New Hampshire this April from the Pew Research Center revealed that almost half of the recipients hung up.

McCain's robocalls to voters question Obama's patriotism in various ways. Calls to voters in New Mexico and Wisconsin use the tenuous link between Obama and '60s radical Bill Ayres as a way to undermine confidence in Obama while the calls made to Virginia accuse Obama and the Democrats of being weak on national security, for example.

Obama's calls to voters in Kansas asked them to join his campaign. Another campaign in Missouri accused McCain of giving tax breaks to corporations that outsource jobs overseas, especially to India.

Are you receiving robocalls? Send recordings to stirland at gmail dot com.

Update:Here's a recording of a call that the uploader says was made to them in Western Pennsylvania:

Full post as published by Threat Level on October 16, 2008 (boomark / email).