Comment by doctorpangloss
1 year ago
As long as 1% or more of voters in Pennsylvania keep voting based on whomever talked to them last; and as long as Super PACs can continue to receive unlimited anonymous money; no media channel will be legally restricted from spamming people. Phone spam is too effective politically.
I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that robocalls produce material swings in elections at all, let alone 1%, a number commonly attributed to all campaign GOTV efforts put together.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-experimen...
3-7 votes per 1k calls
That's turnout GOTV, though, not the vote fraud stuff.
2 replies →
Not honest ones anyways...
Robocalls every election season go out to targeted communities telling them the wrong polling location.
I will leave as an exercise to the reader what political slant those communities almost always have. The impact of those must be very hard to measure.
I don't think there's much evidence that these fraudulent robocalls have much of an impact, if any, either. You can tell a plausible story that they have the opposite effect (they tend to target the Black vote, and the Black vote is relatively well organized compared to other US voting blocs, and is sensitive to suppression). The people running these campaigns tend to be complete chucklefucks, so it doesn't follow from the fact that people are taking the time to do them that they actually work.
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I don't see any reason we can't ban everything but political speech given its status as extra-super-protected.