Orange County Circuit Court Judge Blanton, sitting as a special judge in Harrison County, has apparently held that Indiana’s prohibition on robocalls does not apply to those with a political message.
Specifically, (according to Inside Indiana Business):
Blanton has ruled that Indiana’s autodialer law does not apply to political messages. Judge Blanton says a political message delivered during a political campaign is not the selling of a tangible product, and therefore, the law does not apply.
I haven’t read the judge’s opinion, but as described, I don’t think it holds water. The statute does a few things — it specifies types of messages to which the statute does not apply — e.g. messages from schools to students or parents. Significantly, political messages are not in this list of exempt messages. Secondly, it defines commercial telephone solicitations and imposes restrictions on commercial telephone solicitations above and beyond the restrictions it places on solicitations via robocall generally. There is nothing in the text of the law itself that strongly suggests an allowance for robocalls to be used to spread political messages. There are at least two provisions that suggest that the regulation extends beyond commercial messages. So, unless there is something a bit more nuanced than reported about the judge’s decision, I’m going to predict this one gets overturned on appeal.
We’ll see about the overturning of this. AG Carter will definitely try.
These calls are an epidemic and are invading the privacy of All American Voters.
Our members are taking a stand and saying enough is enough at the National Political Do Not Contact Registry at StopPoliticalCalls.org.
Here is a quote from a member this morning:
“I find it very frustrating… I tend to get calls at the WORST time. I have a one year old daughter, and it NEVER fails that the phone will ring when I put her down for a nap or for bed. Also my vote is PRIVATE… so who do you think you are calling with a survey to find out who I am voting for!!! Stop calling me.”
Regards,
Shaun Dakin
CEO and Founder
http://www.stoppoliticalcalls.org
I’m guessing Judge Blanton had already paid his non-refundable retainer to Campaign-Robocalls-R-Us for his next election.
Have you ever been in Judge Blanton’s court? He’s a great guy, but the opinion should be an interesting read.
The day before the November 2006 election, the Republicans used Robocalls (a recording of Laura Bush) to get some additional support to Mark Souder.
By that time, the Republicans were well aware that robocalls had been deemed illegal.
You know….a law is only broken if the Democrats do it.
I should have mentioned- I have a .wav file of that call if anyone is interested.
I haven’t had the pleasure of going before Judge Blanton. I’m not going to go with the political bias theory without having seen the actual decision. After all, Steve Carter is prosecuting this one pretty actively for the AG, and he’s a Republican.
Kevin Knuth,
Sure, stick it up somewhere.
If you don’t have a place to host it, I can do so. (I’ll probably either compress it or transcode it to a lossy format to keep bandwidth down, in the event it should prove strangely popular.)