Monday, November 07, 2005

That "push poll" you got from FEC Research?

Post-election update:
Thank you, fellow California voters.
Arnold, you oughta be in movies.


It's even worse [than being a 'push poll']; it seems it's not anonymous, they're storing your answers.

(What were the questions? I reflexively hung up after the first automated sentence; funny how you can recognize the voice of sleaze...)

In any case, it appears (from Daily Kos piece today) that "drown it in the bathtub" Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform is behind it; the 'poll' was conducted by FEC Research which is the same as ccAdvertising which is the same as FreeEats.com; they do push polling for Republicans and Republican propositions in several states (here are October accounts from Oregon's Portland Communique and from the Daily Kos).
From ccAdvertising's "about" page:
ccAdvertising utilizes its patented (patents pending) Interactive Voice Response- Speech Recognition (IVRSR) method to ensure that our political, public policy and service organization clients have their messages reach the households they have targeted.

From today's Daily Kos piece:
Sources have confirmed that these push polls are being paid for (at least in part) by the Grover Norquist related "issues" group Americans for Tax Reform.
...
[contains this quote:]
As the computer gathered the answers, it stored each one individually, making it possible to retrieve them later by phone number, household name or address for other purposes.
[end contained quote; if correct, this is very sleazy]

...
when you say you're doing a poll, people assume they are anonymous. And if you're giving a poll that is not going to be anonymous, then the person taking the poll must be told their answers are being record in any sort of way before any question is asked.

But Grover isn't doing that...

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