[porterhaney]

The large problem, that's becoming larger, is that a good portion of a representative audience no longer has land line phones, and refuses to answer phones in general. This type of polling is becoming less and less valuable over time, and will need to be transitioned to digital polling in the near future.

[mjevans]

I refuse to participate in these wastes of my time (I have far more entertaining things to waste my time with).

I do, however, make every effort to exercise my right to vote so that I earn the privilege of 'complaining' about results I dislike (what I voted for didn't win, what I voted for sold us out, the thing I wanted to vote for wasn't an option because of gerrymandering (which is what any form of distracting is)).

[snowwrestler]

The key here is a federal law which outlaws the use of automated dialers to dial mobile phone numbers.

That means that any polling firm that wants to poll people via their mobile phones needs to employ a bunch of humans to laboriously dial every single candidate number--and get hung up on repeatedly. This makes polling mobile phones much more expensive than polling landlines, where you can use a computer to try numbers until someone agrees to take the poll. So most folks will not bother, or will only do very small mobile polls, occasionally.

This was a significant factor in a bunch of Republicans getting a nasty surprise on election night 2012. They simply underestimated how many people without landlines would turn out to vote against them.