How to stop political texts and robocalls

People try this first and conclude the registry is broken. It is not — it simply never covered this. The national registry is aimed at telemarketing sales calls, and political campaigns, party committees, pollsters and charities sit outside it. Registering your number at donotcall.gov is still worthwhile for what it does cover, but a committee texting you about a runoff is not violating it, and no amount of re-registering will change that.

Two lists meet. The first is the voter file: in most states your name, address, party registration and voting history are public record, and campaigns buy it as a matter of routine. That file has no phone number in it. The number is appended afterwards from commercial data — brokers, donation forms, petitions, event sign-ups, warranty cards, an old newsletter you forgot about — and once a number sticks to a voter record it travels. Committees and vendors rent, trade and resell these files among themselves, and a number that answered once gets scored as a proven responder and priced higher. That is the whole reason a candidate in another state can text you by name.

Reply STOP to a legitimate political text and that sender has to stop. Do it — it costs nothing and it is honoured far more often than people expect. What it does not do is take you off the file. You have opted out of one committee working through one texting vendor, while the list they rented carries on being rented. Most of these messages are also sent by a person clicking send, one at a time, through peer-to-peer software; the FCC drew that line in 2020, and it is the reason campaigns can text people who never opted in. So the honest expectation is this: STOP ends a conversation, it does not end the season. Our guide to short codes covers when replying is the wrong move entirely.

Volume is cover. When everyone expects political texts, a fake one stops standing out — and the fakes are where the real money goes. The tells are consistent: a deadline that exists only to stop you checking (a match that triples until midnight, a membership about to lapse, a final notice before your name comes off a list), a link to a domain that is almost right but carries an extra word or a different ending, and a payment method no committee uses. Gift cards, cryptocurrency, a wire, or a payment-app transfer to a person are all disqualifying on their own. If you want to give, close the message and go to the campaign’s own site yourself. Older relatives are targeted hardest here, which is worth a conversation before October — our guide for adult children covers how to have it.

The rules split by line type, which explains why your landline and your mobile behave differently. A prerecorded political call to a landline is generally allowed without consent, as long as it stays inside the permitted hours, names the sponsor at the start and leaves a callback number. The same call to a mobile needs your prior consent, political or not. Since February 2024 the FCC has treated AI-generated and cloned voices in robocalls as illegal outright, so a synthetic voice that sounds like a public figure telling you something about voting is not a novelty — it is the thing regulators went after specifically. Anything urging you not to vote, or giving you a date or a polling place that contradicts your county, should be reported rather than believed.

Forward the message to 7726, which spells SPAM on a keypad. That goes to your carrier and feeds the filters that block the next batch, which is a slow, collective benefit rather than a personal one. Report fraud attempts to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and anything touching how or when to vote to your Secretary of State. None of this gets your number back, and it is worth knowing that going in, so the effort goes where it pays.

Everything above manages the symptom. The supply is the number sitting in commercial databases waiting to be matched to your voter record, and that is the part you can take back. Remove it from the broker and people-search sites that publish and sell it, then keep re-checking, because they re-scrape and rebuild listings within weeks. Our guide to removing your phone number walks the sites one by one, and stopping spam calls covers the carrier filters worth turning on while you wait. Do it before late September and you are ahead of the heaviest weeks.