ROBOCALLS

On Jay Leve, the guy behind SurveyUSA

All these polls were being conducted in a bedroom-sized chamber just outside Leve’s door called “the vault,” in recognition of its actual use back when a rare-coins dealer owned the space. Leve led me inside, and pointed to a corner. “We even kept one of his safes,” he said with a smile. Leve doesn’t use the old steel safe, but the vault is still an apt name because it currently guards the workhorses of Leve’s business: a set of black IBM calling machines, each about the size of a stereo tuner and stacked horizontally in a pair of large metal cabinets. Each machine is capable of having as many as 288 phone lines plugged into its back, creating a messy tangle of multicolored wires running from the machines up into the ceiling. On a busy day, Leve explained, his machines might place a few hundred thousand calls for 30 different polls. (For this election, he is polling in 28 states.) Since Leve began conducting surveys in 1992, his machines have completed 24 million interviews.

Leve, for his part, can be withering about the establishment that rejects him. He bridles at the commonly used term “robo-calling” as a label for what he does. “It could not be a more offensive term,” he says. “It literally is like using the N-word.”