Automated Political Phone Calls Overload Comcast Service In New England

As midterm campaigning reached a fever pitch yesterday, some New England voters found themselves so inundated with political robocalls that their phone service stopped working. Boston’s WCVB TV reports that early Monday afternoon, service outages began to affect towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Since last night, the problem has improved—but as Sam Stein writes at the Huffington Post, it was so bad that Comcast had to issue a statement apologizing to its customers:

“Comcast – and, we believe, other local phone carriers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts – are experiencing severe call volumes on the evening before the election due to auto dialing activity that is generating a massive number of inbound political phone calls to our network,” the statement read.

“As soon as we were made aware of the congestion this was causing, we began to re-route traffic around it. At the same time, we are working hard to identify the carrier that owns the originating telephone numbers generating these unusual traffic volumes in an attempt to address the situation.”

Stein also points out the irony of this situation: automated phone calls from political candidates “seem to repel as many voters are they persuade.” Though there’s obviously no way to tell if this frustrating occurrence will dissuade New Englanders from voting today, we would bet that at least a few disgruntled Comcast users will find themselves staying away from the polls—all because their would-be representatives sold themselves too hard. Ah, democracy.

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