Opinion: How to not get our last-minute votes

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Has anyone ever actually changed his or her vote in response to a robocall? Has anyone actually listened to one of those recorded messages all the way through?

It’s reasonable to assume that market research has been done on this and that robocalls do bring in votes, although many an annoyed voter -- me, perhaps? -- has been tempted to make that a vote for the other side. Now the reports are that campaign robocalls in New England overloaded phone lines and led to some phone outages. You’d think candidates and campaigns would have figured out that a nation that clamored for the Do Not Call Registry doesn’t find nonstop, impersonal, recorded phone messages a delightful exception to its distaste for telemarketing.

--Karin Klein