By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff

Voters in presidential primary states from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania have learned a lot about campaign tactics this year, including these perhaps annoying facts: Candidates pressed for time are making greater use of automated, prerecorded phone calls, and the national “Do Not Call” registry Congress created five years ago to help shield consumers from pesky telemarketers doesn’t apply to political calls.

According to a Pew Research Center report this month, 39 percent of voters say they have received a pre-recorded phone message about the campaign so far, with the share rising to 44 percent in states that have already held a primary or caucus.

Reacting to voter complaints about these “robocalls,” two senators, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter , introduced legislation in February designed to curtail them. Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California has introduced a companion House measure.

But the legislation has run into opposition from the campaign industry, which has been mobilizing even in the midst of a taut political season. The American Association of Political Consultants, which includes telemarketers as well as pollsters, direct-mailers and others in the business of getting people elected, sent out a fundraising appeal last month laying out its lobbying strategy and indicating that the association has been hard at work since last year in anticipation of a federal bill.

“Nobody in our association believes we should be rude or intrusive in people’s lives,” says Wayne Johnson, a consultant with the California political consultancy JohnsonClark Associates and chairman of the association. “But part of a free society is hearing messages you don’t agree with.”

A delegation from the association, including its executive director, Anthony Bellotti, met with Lofgren to make their First Amendment case against regulation last year after she indicated her intention to move legislation. She chairs the House Administration subcommittee on elections. The fundraising letter, written by Chad Gosselink of the Washington consulting firm Zata 3, said the consultants’ association had raised $20,000 for the campaign and was looking for more.

Lofgren’s bill, as well as the measure by Feinstein and Specter, would prohibit political calls between 9 p.m .and 8 a.m. and would also bar more than two calls a day to the same number. It would require that each call include a disclaimer indicating its sponsor and prohibit automated callers from blocking their telephone numbers on caller ID.

Lofgren said in a statement that her bill would not violate the First Amendment free-speech rights of politicians — the big issue in any attempt to regulate campaigns — but would target the “misuse of robocalls,” which she says has escalated in recent years.

Johnson contends that few consultants are violating the rules Lofgren has proposed, but he says that giving those practices the force of law might lead to more stringent rules that could infringe on freedom of speech. “I think that everybody understands that it’s one thing to have access to voters and another to make calls at 2 a.m.,” he says. “But if you can ban calls at 9, what’s stopping a ban on calls at 8 or 7 or 6?”

The consultants last year committed to not making late-night calls and to giving recipients the ability to opt out of future communications. But Shaun Dakin, chief executive of Citizens for Civil Discourse, which supports the bill, says that’s not enough. Since last fall, he’s urged federal candidates to sign a “do not robocall” pledge. Only two House members have signed on: North Carolina Republican Virginia Foxx (who’s a safe bet to win this fall) and Kansas Democrat Nancy Boyda (one of the most endangered members of the freshman class).

The consultants, meanwhile, have received support from the Center for Competitive Politics, a Washington advocacy group founded in 2005 by former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley A. Smith, a noted critic of campaign finance restrictions.

One reason incumbent politicians are keen on regulating the calls, says Michael Darner, a legal associate at Smith’s group, is that a ban on robocalls would benefit some of the wealthiest, most entrenched politicians. “One of the nice things about robocalls,” Darner says, “is that they are really cheap. They allow people who do not have the same resources as well-funded candidates to take part in politics.”