505-578-2691

Called my cell, and since the number is not local to me and the caller id showed "Unknown", I declined the call so it would go to my voicemail. There was a short tone and then a man's voice said:
"Hello, my name is John Harris from CCL Research, a national public opinion research firm. I would like to ask you a few quick survey questions. I'm not selling anything and I will not ask you for a donation. In November, there will be an election for governor and other important offices. How likely are you to vote in this election?" The voice sounded kind of computer generated, but then after a long pause there was a "Hello?" another shorter pause and "Thank you for your time".
I don't know if there was a real person on that line or not, the short tone recorded at the beginning might have been the originating system routing the call so someone in a call center, although there was absolutely no background noise in the message left, and the way the words were spoken were aufully precise and measured, not quite organic feeling. The phone number also does not appear to belong to any business or person, although CCL Research seems to be legitimate. I'm leaning towards them being at least somewhat scammy, possibly they
phish for live numbers to sell to other operations.

Mellie wrote:

... possibly they phish for live numbers to sell to other operations.

That might have been done a few decades ago, when calls had to be dialed manually and there was a per-minute cost for each call connected, so it made sense for a company to want to acquire phone numbers that would guarantee a response.  But today, automatic dialers can call thousands of numbers in a short time with little effort in setting them up and flat-fee service subscriptions with unlimited calling mean that each connected call only costs small fractions of a cent.  Rather than spending money to insure most of the numbers called would end up with he desired result, today it is just a matter of  a caller figuring out what small percentage of calls will pan out and then setting the automatic dialer to call a massive enough number of phone numbers so that percentage will result in the intended number of targets.  They do not care if the other calls are to out of service numbers or people that always send unknown callers to voice mail.