More than two in five American adults live in households without a landline telephone, the most recent measure of society’s movement toward mobile phones—a phenomenon that continues to roil political professionals, particularly pollsters, who rely on phone interviews to determine the views of the broader population.
Thirty-eight percent of adults in the U.S. live in households that have only a wireless telephone, while 2.2 percent have no phone at all, according to new data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the first half of 2013 and released Wednesday. …
Pollsters, in particular, have grappled with Americans’ abandonment of cell phones for years. Calling cell phones is more expensive than dialing landlines because the phone number must be dialed manually, per federal law. That makes automated calls to cell phones illegal, and it means that even those live-caller polls that use a computer dialer to save time can’t reach cells, either. CONT.
Steven Shepard, National Journal