Putting an End to Push Polling: Why It Should Be Banned and Why the First Amendment Lets Congress Ban It
| Autor: | Matthew J. Streb, Evan Gerstmann |
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| Rok vydání: | 2004 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy. 3:37-46 |
| ISSN: | 1557-8062 1533-1296 |
| DOI: | 10.1089/153312904322739916 |
| Popis: | 37 POLLING HAS LONG BEEN an integral part of a robust democracy. It allows politicians and citizens to measure the pulse of public opinion on issues, and it allows candidates to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of both themselves and their opponents. As George Gallup and Saul Rae wrote more than sixty years ago, “The best guarantee for the maintenance of a vigorous democratic life lies not in concealing what people think, but in trying to find out what their ultimate purposes are, and in seeking to incorporate these purposes in legislation.”1 Unfortunately, an increasing number of pollsters and candidates are resorting to a particularly unscrupulous negative campaign technique called “push polling.” Push polls are not really polls at all; their object is not to measure public opinion, but to manipulate it by providing as many “respondents” as possible with hypothetical, sometimes blatantly false information, about candidates, political parties or initiatives. Push polling has a detrimental effect on democracy because it makes people question the validity of legitimate polling and, more importantly, adds to many people’s beliefs that politics is dirty, politicians are corrupt, and the electoral process is flawed.2 Furthermore, the practice is fraudulent: it misleads the listener as to the identity, purpose and reliability of the caller, and it is often used to falsely tarnish the reputation of political opponents. As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives and many state legislatures have tried to pass—or have passed—laws designed to restrict push polling. We argue that these laws are mostly ineffective and instead advocate a complete ban on the practice of push polling. Such a ban, as we would construct it, would be a constitutionally permissible ban on fraudulent/knowingly false speech. We begin with a discussion of what push polling is and the efforts that legislatures have made to limit its use. We then suggest legislation that would ban push polling completely and argue that this legislation passes constitutional muster. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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