As Election Day draws closer, you might be getting calls asking who you plan to vote for.
But AI has made the actual job of polling more difficult — and a group of Montana State University Billings students found out just how much.
See how MSUB students have been conducting political polls over the semester here:
For 39 years, MSUB students have called Montanans for the Mountain State Poll. But this year, they sometimes weren't reaching a voter at all.
"It was mainly voicemails that we were getting to, or we would get onto the AI screening," MSUB student Lindsey Watson said.
AI call screening can put technology between the caller and the person they're trying to reach. And call-blocking technology can go even further, labeling a legitimate research call as potential spam or blocking it altogether.
According to Gallup, these systems generally don't distinguish between marketing calls and calls from survey researchers.
And there's evidence that label matters. In two SSRS studies cited by Gallup, only about one in 10 people who saw a spam warning said they answered the call.
At MSUB, the real-world consequence is twice the calling for the same number of completed surveys.
"On average, since I've been here, we get about two completes per student per hour. This year it was one," Dr. Hope Dewell Gentry said.
When asked whether it's taking longer to collect the same amount of data, Dewell Gentry said, "Absolutely. Double."
And this isn't just happening in a university classroom. America's largest polling organizations have spent years wrestling with the same basic problem.
Gallup's telephone polling response rate fell from 28% in 1997 to 7% in 2017. Pew Research Center's fell from 36% in 1997 to just 6% in 2018.
The decline started long before today's AI screening. But Pew Research Center specifically identified robocalls, spam warnings and technology mistakenly flagging legitimate survey calls as part of the problem.
Gallup also found some pollsters have even resorted to repeatedly changing the phone numbers they call from to avoid getting blocked.
"People don't answer their phones anymore anyway. And that was true even pre-AI screening," Dewell Gentry said.
But now, she says, AI screening adds another gatekeeper.
"Now it pops right up on your screen and a lot of people are probably thinking, 'Well, yeah, I would like less spam calls,'" Dewell Gentry said.
So pollsters are changing the way they reach us. Gallup says telephone surveys have become harder and more expensive, and it now uses online and mail surveys for much of its U.S. research.
Now, MSUB's political science classes are adapting, too.
"I was going to have to be fairly reliant on the online portion of this survey because the phone version was quite a bit less this year than it was last year," Dewell Gentry said.
Dewell Gentry is even considering adding mailed surveys.
"When people don't answer their phones, that makes it less and less scientific. So I keep having to come back in and add extra things to make sure that it's still scientific," Dewell Gentry said.
AI call screening may help us dodge unwanted calls. But when legitimate pollsters can't get through either, finding enough real people to measure what voters actually think takes more calls, more methods and more work.
