COLUMBUS, Ohio — Election Day is one week away and voter turnout is holding strong during the early voting period. According to the Ohio Secretary of State's office, less than 20,000 voters in Franklin County have cast their ballot.
As early voting continues, campaigns continue to reach out for your vote, and if your phone is blowing up with political text messages, you’re not alone.
Political campaigns are able to get your phone number based on your voter registration information. While there is no stopping them from reaching out, there is a way to filter the text messages and stop getting notifications.
You can reply “STOP” to some of these messages to get your number removed from the system. However, it may not always be that simple and you don’t want to do that if the number looks suspicious.
There is a way you can filter out these messages into a separate folder for both Apple and Android users.
For Apple users, select the “Filter unknown senders” option under the Messages portion in your Settings app. For Android users, you can enable spam protection in your settings.
Unfortunately, there is no way to completely stop receiving political text messages as any campaign is able to get your number based on your voter registration information.
“It’s highly visible. We see open rates extremely high on text messages. We have 95% deliverability in a lot of cases so it’s an essay way for us to get in front of voters that we know are with our candidates and with us" said Bryan Watkins, chief operating officer of the California Republican Party.
If you think the text message you're receiving isn't actually from a campaign and is just spam, you should not respond to it.