DENTON, Texas — Raise your hand if you’ve received a flurry of text messages from political candidates this election cycle.
“It’s annoying to the point where I’ve tried to block them. I’ve tried to delete all the ones that come through so that it won’t be a repeat,” Dallas County voter Shawn Hill said. “But it’s annoying.”
Tasha Smith, another Dallas County voter, acknowledged there are pros and cons to candidates texting voters so much.
“It could be helpful for somebody like my dad, who needs the reminder,” Smith said. “But for me, on the other hand, who may not need the reminder, it’s annoying.”
The team from RoboKiller, an app that blocks spam calls and texts, said their data shows Texas had the second most political robotexts in the country in September.
Viewers tweeted at WFAA and wrote about just how many political texts they’ve been receiving.
“As a political scientist, there's a research question here in that: Is there a certain number of texts and phone calls that make you so annoyed that you're going to vote against that person?” UNT political science professor Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha told WFAA.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC’s website, “political text messages can be sent without the intended recipient’s prior consent if the message’s sender does not use autodialing technology to send such texts and instead manually dials them.”
“Really the FCC needs to be involved and regulate this. Right now, there's just not a lot of regulation for these sorts of communications,” Eshbaugh-Soha said. “There is a work around in terms of what it means to be the human messenger. I think maybe they just instigate it and get the ball rolling so to speak. But I have a hard time believing that there's a person sending individual texts repeatedly to different phone numbers.”
Candidates can get your digits from the state’s voter registration file. It’s also possible the political parties buy phone lists, according to Eshbaugh-Soha.
“If you make contact with any campaign, your phone number is there,” Eshbaugh-Soha said. “There's not sort of an opt out or sort of a privacy warning or something that ensures that you can control that information.”
“For the most part, I consider myself somewhat educated, I pretty much know who I want to vote for so those types of texts didn’t do anything for me but annoy me,” Hill said.
If you think you've received a political robocall or text that does not comply with the FCC's rules, you can file an informal complaint with the FCC here. If you are receiving texts that you didn't ask for, report the sender by forwarding the texts to 7726 (or "SPAM"). For more information, click here.