North Carolina Led Country in Robocalls Amid Election Push

(TNS) — On the final day of the 2020 election, North Carolina residents received more political robocalls than any other state, says an analysis by Transaction Network Services, a company that helps cell phone companies and their customers detect and block spam phone calls.

On Nov. 3, more than 972,000 political calls were made to North Carolinians, TNS said, out of about 8.25 million voter outreach calls made nationwide that day. North Carolina was flooded with such calls since late August, it said.

North Carolina's was a battleground state this year, in play primarily for the presidential election and in the U.S. Senate race between Democrat  Cal Cunningham  and Republican incumbent. Sen.  Thom Tillis . The Cunningham-Tillis Senate race is reported to be the most expensive in American history.

While many of the automated calls (some pre-recorded, some with live callers) appear to be from political campaigns and pollsters, some had a message that told voters to "stay safe and stay home," TNS said. The Department of Homeland Security said the "stay safe and stay home" calls looked like an attempt to intimidate voters into not voting.

Read all about it: FBI investigating robocalls that told voters to 'stay safe and stay home' on Election Day.

Transaction Network Services looks for scam, spam and robocalls in the telephone call traffic among 400 and 500 phone companies in the United States, or more than 1 billion telephone calls daily, said  Jim Tyrrell , the senior director of product marketing at TNS.

The company uses computer algorithms to find patterns to detect which calls are robocalls, Tyrrell said. It also uses "honeypot" phone numbers — lines that receive robocalls so their messages can be recorded — he said. TNS also gets its information from telephone company customers who use an app on their phones to report when they get these calls.

"Obviously we got a lot of feedback that these were political robocalls, etc.," during the election period, Tyrell said.

The majority of the calls on Election Day were focused on encouraging people to vote or persuading voters to pick one party or candidate or another, Tyrrell said.

But the "stay safe and stay home" appears to have been a voter suppression attempt, Tyrrell said.

"It was a really odd message where it just said, 'Stay at home, stay safe. This is a test,'" he said. "It was difficult to detect because they were spoofing or using wireless numbers that were — in calling other numbers — other wireless numbers. And they wouldn't make a large number of calls from any one particular number. They would kind of rotate through several different numbers. It was kind of hard to — hard to pick up."

Heartbreaking election story: 'Hardest thing I've done' — Elections director had to block her deceased mother's ballot.

With the heavy amount of absentee balloting this year by voters who wanted to avoid exposure to the coronavirus, " Election Day" ran for two months in North Carolina. Absentee ballots started reaching voters in early September.

"The weeks leading up in September and October, North Carolina really kind of led the — led the charge, if you will, in seeing two, three million calls a week," Tyrrell said. Residents probably got several such calls per day, he said.

(c)2020 The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.