A small change in a robocall the other day was an announcement of the name of a company responsible for the call and a toll-free number to verify the call. And even if you were able to write down the number and you called it, was it real? The truth is that the call could have been from a legitimate survey company or from any of the political parties. There will be a tremendous growth in those automated calls over the months to come and the numbers you press at your end will be recorded and added to growing political databases.
But similar to the households where a four-year old is allowed to answer the telephone, when you call this household, you get random numbers pressed to hopefully mess up the system. Robotic telephone calls are a disgrace allowed for some reason by Prime Minister Harper’s appointees on the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The calls are intrusive, unappreciated and annoying to most Canadians. And if the callers do not want to spend the time and effort to have a human call, they get the answers they deserve.
Yet, to some extent, they work. The cheapness of robocalls allows real survey companies to greatly extend the number of calls and the size of the respondent pool can hide some of the inaccuracies. By dealing in larger respondent pools and a higher frequency of calls, survey companies can develop trends and patterns that can be mathematically translated into potential vote results.
But it is the political party databases that are of much greater concern today. They not only contain your household’s answers to voting intention but they also note what you said to canvassers, if you had a political sign and if you voted or not in the past couple elections. It can include information that will cause one party to hound you to go to the polls while another will try to misdirect you to the wrong voting place.
It is hardly surprising in the age of social media that so much information about us is so readily available. Maybe it is not the data but how it is used, we should question. If you are a member or contributor to any political party, you are going to be constantly spammed for more contributions. It is a matter of only being able to cut off the spam if you also cut off the party information.
But if you are foolish enough to tell these automated calls how you expect to vote, you get what you deserve. If you have ever wondered why the Green Party and the NDP have such high figures in opinion polls and then lower results in the actual vote, it is smart voters who consider their voting intention confidential. They effectively park their vote with another party until the election.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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