The rapidly burgeoning numbers of people who have jettisoned their home telephones is a mixed bag for pollsters and political consultants.

Almost one in five Californians relies solely on a cellphone, a nearly 10 percentage point jump since 2007, according to the latest national statistics.

On the down side, federal law bars calling cellphones with the aid of automatic or predictive phone-dialing equipment, the staple of pollsters and sophisticated robocall and telemarketing systems.

The restriction emerged before most cellphone plans offered unlimited minutes, and consumers passionately opposed fees for unwanted and unsolicited calls.

"We worry about it a lot," said Oakland-based pollster Alex Evans. "But we have ways to deal with it."
The chief answer, like most things, is more money.

If a representative sample list contains respondents with cellphone contacts, the survey team must dial the numbers by hand, which takes longer and costs more. Given the growing percentage of cellphone users, pollsters find it increasingly likely that they must spend more to conduct at least a portion of their calls manually.

The pollsters' bane is a boon for campaign managers and political phone bank organizers.

They can skip the expensive installation of a roomful of temporary telephone lines. Most campaign volunteers have their own cellphones and can make calls from voter lists that now
routinely contain cellular numbers.

And recipients no longer have to be home to take a call from a pollster or a campaign.

Inexplicably, people wonder how pollsters and campaigns obtain cell numbers. There is no public equivalent of the published landline telephone book for cellular numbers, and most of the online search engines require a fee or subscription.

But people are far less parsimonious with their cell numbers than they once were, especially those who gave up their land-lines and conduct all their business on a mobile device.

Many people now list cellphone numbers on their voter registration forms or when they sign up online with a political party or other entity.

Data companies regularly scrape the Web for cell numbers and sell the information, which has become more stable now that consumers may keep the same number even if they change service providers.

Many cellphone consumers fear federal regulations will wane and they will start once again picking up for annoying automated calls from candidates and ballot measure campaigns.

But there's always another way in the high-tech world, as one consultant points out.

Texting will largely replace the use of robocalls, said Wayne Johnson, a Sacramento-based consultant and past president of the American Association of Political Consultants. Believe it or not, he says, political activists don't really want to interrupt your dinner. They want results.

"A lot of people who would be annoyed to receive a phone call are signing up to receive text updates or messages," Johnson said. "A lot of activist organizations are starting to maintain phone lists, and send out text messages asking people to call this legislator or take this action."

WE DIGRESS: On the related subject of technology and activism, Johnson takes a dim view of Facebook as an agent of political change.

"The greatest threat to human involvement is Facebook," Johnson said. "Fight world hunger? Click 'Like.' Seriously? Like? Facebook has turned every cause into clicks. It's not about actually doing anything."

MORE DIGRESSION: One might expect California, home to the high-tech capital of the world, to rank near the top when it comes a state-by-state percentage breakout of cellphone-only households.
But that distinction belongs to Arkansas and Mississippi, where 35 percent of households rely solely on a cellular phone compared with 18 percent in the Golden State.
Why? It's the poor who cannot afford both a landline and a cellphone.