Your Phone is Under Siege: Why Oklahoma Voters Are Getting Blasted With Political Texts

Your phone buzzes. Again. And again. You check the screen expecting a friend or family member, but instead it’s yet another political campaign trying to convince you how to vote. If you’re an Oklahoma voter, you’re not imagining things — the onslaught is real, and it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.

The numbers are staggering. Leading up to June 16’s primary election, Oklahoma voters experienced a tsunami of political text messages, with some residents receiving as many as 10 messages per day. One voter in Sapulpa got a text at 10:30 p.m. the night before the election. It’s not a coincidence or a glitch — it’s a deliberate strategy, and the scale of it has exploded.

Campaign finance reports tell the story. From early April through mid-June, candidates and outside groups dumped $773,808 into text messaging services. That’s over 13 times what campaigns spent on texting during the entire 2022 gubernatorial cycle, when the total was less than $60,000. The technology and the legal landscape have aligned to create a perfect storm for voter harassment.

Here’s why campaigns love texting: it’s dirt cheap (as low as 2 cents per message versus hundreds of thousands for TV ads), it reaches people when they’re most vulnerable (late night, when tired viewers are more likely to engage), and it works. Political texting services boast open rates as high as 98%. Using platforms like RumbleUp, a single volunteer can send up to 10,000 text messages per hour. That’s not hyperbole — that’s the advertised capability. Data brokers like DataZapp sell voter phone numbers for as little as 4 cents per person, making it absurdly easy to target Oklahomans with pinpoint accuracy.

What about protection? Oklahoma’s Telephone Solicitation Act, passed in 2022, forbids marketing calls and texts between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. and limits contacts to three per 24-hour period. But there’s a massive loophole: political messaging is completely exempt. Federal courts have consistently ruled that campaigns have a First Amendment right to their message, making regulation nearly impossible without running afoul of free speech protections.

Voters like Sarah Frye, a registered Republican from Ada, and Diann Patrick from Sapulpa, described the experience as violating and a turn-off — yet they had no practical way to stop the messages. Patrick said she keeps her data secure and never gave her information to campaigns, yet still couldn’t escape the barrage. Both women expressed frustration that their voices seemed to fall on deaf ears. The irony is sharp: campaigns are trying to persuade you to vote for them, but in doing so, they’re actively annoying the very people they’re trying to reach. Sarah Frye summed it up perfectly: when the same candidate names kept appearing over and over, she voted against them.“You’ve gone too far,”she said.

The only real relief available right now comes from phone settings. As of September 2025, Apple rolled out an update allowing iPhone users to filter messages from unknown numbers into a separate folder without notifications. Android offers a similar option. But that’s a Band-Aid on a much bigger problem.

Melissa Michelson, a professor at Menlo College and expert in political communications, offered some sobering perspective: campaigns will keep texting as long as it works.“If we can all collectively agree to stop clicking on the messages, they’ll stop,”she said.“But as long as they work, those messages are going to keep coming. It would be extremely difficult to get the courts to agree to regulations to limit them.”In other words, the court of public opinion is your only real weapon. Vote with your feet — and your ballot.

Some states are starting to push back. California, for example, passed a law in 2023 requiring data brokers to delete personal information upon request, making it harder for campaigns to build targeted profiles. But Oklahoma hasn’t gone that far. For now, if you’re tired of the buzz, your best bet is to use your phone’s built-in tools and remember which candidates showed you no respect when election day rolls around.