I checked the Secretary of State’s web site, and it’s true. I sent an outraged email demanding that my phone number and email be removed from the rolls, and got a reply asking me to send more info and they’d see what they could do.

But before I got the reply, I took matters into my own hands: I went online to the voter registration form, and changed my phone number to an old Skype number that I never check, and never rings unless I happen to have Skype running. I also changed the email to one specifically made up for my registration, so I could track who was mining the lists. At the same time I changed my party preference to none, more accurately expressing my feelings, and depriving the data miners of one datum.

It’s been pretty effective. The only texts I get are from people I’ve signed up with, like the Democratic Socialists, Resist!, and Protect the Vote.

It is important to give election officials a way to contact you, in case they have a problem with your ballot, like a signature miscompare. But I took care of that separately by signing up for BallotTrax (https://california.ballottrax.net/voter/), a service my county election department uses to inform voters about the status of their ballot. I highly recommend it.

I’m happy to report that it tells me “Ballot Accepted
10/17/2020
Your ballot has been accepted! Your ballot was received by your county elections office and will be counted.”

Yay! Take that, Trump!

There are companies that harvest names and their phone numbers and sell the info… obviously distasteful…

If the texting campaign is a ‘get out the vote’ campaign, you can definitely tell they are targeting known supporters- nearly every response you get is positive…

There are times when the numbers we get are clearly not selected by party affiliation- we get more republicans responding- usually with vulgarity, and bad grammar.

However, even on these texting campaigns the clear majority of responses is positive… I don’t think that necessarily reflects public opinion (It was mostly positive when I was texting Texas residents) it just reflects that people are more likely to respond to texts they approve of…

One thing that is absolutely mandatory, and they repeatedly stress it in the training, is if anyone asks to be removed from the list, they MUST be removed.