All sorts of crazy stuff has been happening as we reach the end of a long and very chaotic presidential election. In Pennsylvania, considered the battleground state as far as this political race is concerned, voters were recently hit by what has been called a deceptive text messaging campaign that seemed designed to convince them that they had already voted when they hadn’t.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that officials in Montgomery County have been warning voters about the weird campaign, which targets voters with simple texts. “Records show you voted,” the mysterious messages read. The message included a link to a legitimate state government website with polling information.
However, the campaign was actually the work of an organization called “AllVote,” the Inquirer reports.
The Inquirer notes that similar “AllVote”-related campaigns have also popped up in the battleground states of Arizona and North Carolina. On Tuesday, a Texas news outlet reported that similar texts had popped up in Dallas County. Weirdly, in that case, the text messages seem to have been telling voters who had voted that they hadn’t.
“We did as we were supposed to do. We came out, turned our phone on and immediately received that text,” a voter told the outlet. “It said someone in your house with my address on my personal cell phone may not have voted.” She added: “I don’t understand how someone would get this information and so quickly that we would both get this text immediately after voting.”
These messages may be an effort to cull important personal information from voters. PBS notes that many of the AllVote messages falsely told voters that they weren’t registered when they actually were. The messages encouraged them to submit personal information to its website, AllVote.com.
“We are asking residents to stay vigilant and be careful with their personal information,” said Jamila H. Winder, chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, in Pennsylvania. “It is an unfortunate reality that these bad actors know how important voting is to Montgomery County residents and will use that to exploit them. We need everyone to be aware and protect their personal data.”
When reached for comment by Gizmodo, AllVote provided the following statement: “We at AllVote are working to ensure that voters have the information they need to exercise their right to vote. We do this by texting them reminders, as well as information about where they can find their nearest voting location.” AllVote attributed voter confusion to an “error” that was included in a message. “In the heat of the campaign season, workers working long hours simply made a copy editing mistake. The “in 2022″ was left out of the script,” the AllVote representative said. “We apologized for this error, which we understand caused significant confusion, especially amongst voters who have not voted yet but were told they had. The campaign was stopped as soon as we realized the error, and a correction was sent to all voters who received the initial text.”
Manipulative text campaigns have obviously been a staple of politics for quite some time, though their sophistication has clearly grown. The best course of action is to stick with official information from state websites and ignore everything else.
