Get out the vote campaigns have been going digital this year due to the coronavirus pandemic as political groups try to find new ways to reach potential voters ahead of tomorrow's (November 3) presidential election. Instead of going door-to-door to urge people to vote, political groups are turning to text messages and robocalls to reach voters.
According to data compiled by Robokiller, an app that aims to eliminate robocalls and text messages, Americans received more than five billion text messages and over 100 million robocalls in the month of October alone.
While robocalls and automated text messages sent without the consent of the person on the receiving end are illegal, political groups have found a loophole. Using apps with access to publicly available voter information, volunteers can manually send out hundreds of text messages from the comfort of their own homes.
"You have maybe 100 text messages assigned to you, and you just click 'Send,' and it sends off the message, and you send it to the next person, and you click 'Send' until you've sent it to everyone," Emily Isaac, voter mobilization director for MoveOn told ABC News. "A lot of people might think it's a robot; it's totally not. It's a human. It's a volunteer. You could be sitting, you know, watching Netflix just hanging out."
Republicans are outpacing Democrats with their outreach efforts, sending out 1.4 billion political texts, compared to the Democrats' total of 615 million text messages. Over 40% of the messages were sent in swing states and states that offered early voting.
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