How do you stop the flood of political scam texts before Election Day — and tell the real ones from the fakes?

Ahead of the US midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, phones are being flooded with political texts — urgent donation pleas, fake announcements and lookalikes built to rush a tap. Why blocking never fully works, and five steps: never donate from a text link, filter unknown senders, use STOP carefully, report to 7726, and treat urgency itself as the scam signal.

Short answer: you cannot stop political texts completely, but you can cut the flood down and make the scams in it harmless. With the US midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, phones are being flooded with urgent donation pleas, fake announcements and lookalike messages built to rush you into one quick tap.Why blocking never quite works: campaigns and outside groups get phone numbers from voter files and data brokers, and each sender texts from different numbers, so blocking one sender rarely stops the next message. That is a feature of how the system is built, not a failure on your part — which is why the goal shifts from “stop them all” to “never let one cost you money.”Do these five things today:1.

Never donate through a link in a text. Close the message, open your browser yourself, and type the campaign’s official website address in by hand.2. Turn on your phone’s unknown-sender filter.

On iPhone: Settings > Messages > Filter Unknown Senders. On Android, open Messages settings and switch on Spam protection.3. Reply STOP only to senders you believe are legitimate — and never reply to an obvious scam.

Any reply tells the scammer your number is live and read.4. Report the junk. Use the Report Junk or spam option in your Messages app, and forward scam texts to 7726 (SPAM) so your carrier can track the sender.5.

Treat secrecy and instant payment demands as an automatic scam. Any text that says pay now, tell no one, or decide in the next ten minutes gets deleted, full stop.Pro tip: a real campaign will still gladly take your donation on its official website tomorrow. Urgency is the scammer’s tool — the moment a message tries to hurry you, it has told you what it is.

Watch today’s paired Halloween scams video for the same habits applied to fake shops and tickets.