To more easily prevent telemarketers from calling home phones of Wisconsin residents, bipartisan legislators from both houses are promoting a bill that would allow people to permanently be placed on the do-not-call list.

Rep. Andre Jacque, R-DePere, and Sen. Sheila Harsdorf, R-River Falls,  introduced the bill, which would no longer require residents to renew their membership to Wisconsin’s do-not-call list biennially. It instead keep them on this list indefinitely.

Jacque said the bill will also prevent those on the do-not-call list from receiving political robo-calls.

“It doesn’t matter where people are on the political spectrum,” he said, adding he believes at least 95 percent of legislators support the bill. “These calls aren’t being heard. They just cause annoyance and frustration.”

While Wisconsin is currently one of 14 states operating on state do-not-call lists, Jacque said the Badger state is the least protective among them in terms of length of of time residents are protected from electronic telemarketer calls.

When Wisconsin’s calling list was created in 2001, administrators lacked an efficient way of scrubbing through each resident’s contact information to determine whether they were on the do-not-call list, which added expenses to the state, Jacque added.

“It makes a lot of sense to make it permanent and have it accrue to the benefit of the consumer,” he said. “They can always take their names off the list if they choose to. There’s a reason why you don’t see people asking to take their names off the do-not-call list. It’s probably the state’s most popular program.”

At a Senate Committee on Energy, Consumer Protection and Governmental Reform public hearing Tuesday, a leader of the state’s Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection said the bill would cost $48,000 for staff to field requests to join the potentially-permanent do-not-call registry.

Sandy Chalmers, administrator for DATCP’s consumer protection division, which managers the do-not-call list, said switching to the federal registry, which is updated daily, would save the state $225,000 a year.

Jacque said he and Harsdorf plan to amend the bill to adopt the federal do-not-call registry and save the state these costs. 

However, Chalmers said the bill will not address issues of fake robo-calls not made from American companies.
  

“Unfortunately, this bill will do nothing to address the millions and millions and millions of fraudulent robo-calls that people are getting,” Chalmers said. “Most of those originate from overseas, and many of them are organized crime rings that originate from countries like Jamaica, Russia and India.”

Assistant journalism professor Michael Wagner, an expert in elections, said in an email to The Badger Herald people are uniform in their hatred for robo-calls, especially as election day draws near. 

But he said the bill’s restrictions on political telemarketing inhibit candidates’ free speech. While he said the bill might be popular, it would also limit the amount of contact citizens have with those who represent them.

However, Jacque said there is no reason for exempting political robo-calls from the do-not-call list aside from political parties and their lobbying associations being in favor of using the automatic calls as campaign tools. 

“I just happen to think that has been abused and we want to encourage the sort of direct communications with the candidate where there is a live person involved,” Jacque said.