GELFAND’S WORLD-A couple of days ago, the phone rang, and a female voice introduced herself as representing a local political campaign. I could hear the sounds of voices around her, all speaking at once. "Boiler room" was my thought. People paid minimum wage to cold-call strangers in support of a candidate. So I asked the question I always ask: "Where are you located? What state are you calling from?"
"We are not allowed to give out that information," I was told. Now that is strange, I thought. The phony fund raisers from the upper midwest who are always calling to ask for $75 to give gift baskets to hospitalized kids will admit, if you ask them, their location and the name of the company they work for. They will even admit, if you ask, how little of your money actually goes to the hospitalized kids. The last one told me that they had to pay out 15% to the intended recipients. I thanked him for his candor and suggested that he might look for a job that would allow him to sleep at night.
This political call was different, because the caller ID on the phone identified the source as a California area code. Burbank, actually. But no amount of questioning or cajoling on my part would elicit any information about the location or the name of the company.
Since this was beginning to seem like an interesting topic to share here on CityWatch -- particularly because the caller identified with one of the candidacies I wrote about last week (When Good Candidates Go Bad) [http://www.citywatchla.com/4box-left/6931-california-politics-when-good-candidates-go-bad] -- it seemed like an appropriate time to ask for the supervisor.
The supervisor (are they ever really the supervisors when you ask for them?) was similarly closed mouthed. No location info. No company name.
The supervisor offered to put me on with the floor manager. I don't know what a floor manager is, but he came on. Still no dice. There was one part of the conversation with the floor manager that was suspicious. He pointed out to me that they were just trying to ask me a few survey questions about their indicated candidate.
Aha. No wonder all the secrecy. There is a game that sleazy organizations play that is called push polling. It works like this. The caller asks you, "Would it have any affect on your vote if you were told that candidate John Smith has a criminal record and opposes the three strikes law? That's the question for the conservative listener. The idea is to use the faux polling to push you away from any possible support you might have for that candidate. If you are a liberal, you might be asked whether it would affect your vote to find out that the candidate in question wants to cut food stamps and unemployment insurance payments.
Now here is the curious part of this story. The caller was pretending to be from one of the local campaigns I wrote about last week, but when I called the campaign headquarters, I was informed that they were not using outside phone banks. "We have a few volunteers doing phone work here, but that's all." A look at the campaign expenditures, as provided on the Secretary of State website, was consistent with that claim.
So it was starting to come together in a half-way sort of way. A telemarketing boiler room operation was calling me claiming to be from a local campaign, but everyone was incredibly cagey when asked about their corporate identity. Everything else from official sources pointed to the likelihood that the real campaign wasn't using hired phone bankers. Who were these guys?
It all smelled of some independent expenditure campaign gone off the deep end. The tone and comments also suggested that this was likely a push polling operation. Not a hundred percent certain, but suspicious.
Is this even legal, when an anonymous call center starts out a call by pretending to be from somebody's campaign?
What are the rules that govern phone banking in California elections? I got a crash course from a nice person at the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) who returned my call and listened patiently to my story. Part of the answer is wrapped up in the rules that govern the actual candidates and their campaigns, as opposed to the sleazy independent expenditure operators.
The operant word for a real candidate is the committee, as in "the committee to elect George Robertson to the Assembly." The committee is the organization that runs the campaign, collects donations, pays bills, and files reports with the proper authorities in a timely manner. The committee is, in a sense, the legal representation of the candidate and the campaign. It's a little like the idea of a corporation being the legal representation of a collection of stores and salaried employees.
So what are the rules? The state authorities like to use words like threshold. If your campaign stays under the threshold, then you have less filing to do. In the case of phone banking, there is a threshold of $1000, which triggers things like reporting requirements.
There is one other threshold, if you want to call it that. For a phone operation to be required to fulfill some requirements -- which include giving committee identifications during the call -- the person talking to you has to engage in advocacy. Advocacy is defined, roughly speaking, as suggesting that you vote for the candidate. Apparently doing voter education alone is not advocacy.
For example, if I were to call you and explain that candidates A, B, and C support limits on selling cigarettes to minors, while candidate D opposes limiting cigarette sales, that is not advocacy per se. It's educating you regarding the positions taken by the candidates.
The intent, of course, is to warn you off of candidate D, so it is advocacy in all but name. But it falls beneath the level that would trigger advocacy reporting. To be advocacy, the call would have to urge you to vote for candidate A because he opposes selling cigarettes to minors, as opposed to that awful person, candidate D.
What this all means in practice is that independent expenditure campaigns can skirt the rules and avoid crossing thresholds by stopping short of advocacy as defined legally. They can insinuate, imply, and generally paint the walls with mud a foot thick, as long as they do it with the wink and the nod.
By the way, these rules apply both to robo-calls and to live calls.
A real campaign committee is rapidly going to hit the $1000 threshold, and its calls are going to urge you to vote for their candidate. This triggers the requirement that the identity of the campaign be identified either at the beginning or end of the call. That official disclaimer is the part you hear, typically at the end, saying "this ad paid for by the Rockefeller for Governor Committee."
I got one of those robo-calls while working on this column, so I listened all the way to the end to hear if the disclosure rule was being obeyed. Indeed it was, as a second voice informed me that the call was paid for by the committee to elect Patrick O'Donnell.
There oughta be a law. There should be a legal requirement that any paid telephone operation be required, if asked, to supply the name of the company that is running the operation, the name of the organization that is paying for the call, and what state the call is being made from. That would at least allow people like me to tell you the names and identities of the organizations that are fouling our electoral pond.
If anybody has information about who or what is doing anonymous paid political calling from a Burbank number, please contact me at the email address given below. My attempt to call their number back and invite comment got only as far as a recording.
By the way, the part that got my suspicions up right from the start? The caller tried to identify herself as calling for Suja Lowenthal, but couldn't pronounce Suja and had to repeat that part of the script, still getting the pronunciation wrong. Later, one of the higher ups told me that they were calling for Suja Lowenthal for School Board. I asked him if he was sure, and he told me he was. This is curious because Lowenthal has been off the school board and on the City Council for a good number of years now.
It reminded me of those stories of campaign operatives in an eastern city who called voters to tell them to be sure and vote on Wednesday. This was great except that the election was on Tuesday. Voter mis-education has been a part of the American political landscape as long as we have been in existence, but we should at least be able to know and to report who is doing it.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 44
Pub: May 30, 2014
