Pennsylvania Residents Peppered With False Texts Claiming They Already Voted

All types of loopy stuff has been taking place as we attain the top of an extended and really chaotic presidential election. In Pennsylvania, thought-about the battleground state so far as this political race is anxious, voters have been not too long ago hit by a misleading textual content messaging marketing campaign that sought to persuade them that that they had already voted after they hadn’t.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that officers in Montgomery County have been warning voters in regards to the bizarre spam marketing campaign, which targets voters with easy texts. “Information present you voted,” the mysterious messages learn. The message included a hyperlink to a professional state authorities web site with polling info.

Nonetheless, the marketing campaign was really the work of a sketchy group known as “AllVote,” the Inquirer studies.

The Inquirer notes that comparable “AllVote”-related campaigns have additionally popped up within the battleground states of Arizona and North Carolina. On Tuesday, a Texas information outlet reported that comparable texts had popped up in Dallas County. Weirdly, in that case, the textual content messages appear to have been telling voters who had voted that they hadn’t.

“We did as we have been presupposed to do. We got here out, turned our cellphone on and instantly acquired that textual content,” a voter advised the outlet. “It mentioned somebody in your own home with my handle on my private mobile phone might not have voted.” She added: “I don’t perceive how somebody would get this info and so rapidly that we might each get this textual content instantly after voting.”

These messages could also be an effort to cull essential private info from voters. PBS notes that lots of the AllVote messages falsely advised voters that they weren’t registered after they really have been. The messages inspired them to submit private info to its web site, AllVote.com.

“We’re asking residents to remain vigilant and watch out with their private info,” mentioned Jamila H. Winder, chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, in Pennsylvania. “It’s an unlucky actuality that these unhealthy actors understand how essential voting is to Montgomery County residents and can use that to take advantage of them. We’d like everybody to remember and defend their private information.”

Manipulative textual content campaigns have clearly been a staple of politics for fairly a while, although their sophistication has clearly grown. One of the best plan of action is to stay with official info from state web sites and ignore every thing else.