Uprise RI · Kaelen Valeborn · September 9, 2026
Rhode Islanders can sign up to block sales texts, but the Do Not Call Registry skips political messages by design. The law is more tangled than "campaigns are exempt," and that tangle is where a fix would have to start.
State law already bars unsolicited commercial texts to Rhode Islanders, but nothing at the state or federal level gives voters a reliable way to stop campaign texts once they've said no. Whether that changes depends on choices at the FCC, in Congress and at the General Assembly.
Polls are open across Rhode Island today, and for a lot of us the closing argument of this primary did not arrive in a mailbox or on a doorstep. It arrived as a text. Then another. Then another, from a number we had never seen, asking us to vote, to volunteer, to chip in before midnight.
If you spent years on the National Do Not Call Registry assuming it would spare you this, I have bad news, and it is written into the rules. The Federal Trade Commission's own guidance on the Telemarketing Sales Rule says political solicitations are not telemarketing at all, because they are not trying to sell you goods or services. The Federal Communications Commission says the same thing from its side of the fence: political calls are not covered by the national registry or by any company-specific do-not-call list. The registry was built to stop salespeople. A candidate is not a salesperson. So the registry does nothing.
That gap is real, and it is worth being angry about. But the popular version of the complaint, that campaigns have a blanket license to spam you while a business doing the same thing would be breaking the law, gets the law wrong in ways that matter if you actually want it fixed. Political texts are not exempt from federal telephone law. Many of them are already illegal without your consent. The problem is that the line between legal and illegal runs through the campaign vendor's software, not through anything you can see on your screen.
The Do Not Call Registry and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act are separate machines that people tend to mash together.
The TCPA, passed by Congress in 1991, does not care whether a message is commercial or political. It cares how the message was delivered. It restricts calls made with an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice to a cell phone without the recipient's prior express consent. The FCC ruled in 2015 that a text message counts as a call for these purposes, and its current consumer guide on political campaign robocalls and robotexts says it plainly: autodialed political texts to mobile phones require prior express consent.
The same guide draws the other half of the line. Political texts that are sent manually, one at a time by a human being, may be sent without prior consent. That is the carve-out, and it is a technological one. Nobody wrote "campaigns may spam" into the statute. What exists instead is a rule that turns on whether a person pushed the button for each message.
How much does that distinction hold up in a world of texting platforms built for volume? Less than campaigns would like. The Supreme Court narrowed the definition of an autodialer in Facebook v. Duguid in April 2021, holding that a system has to have the capacity to use a random or sequential number generator to qualify. That ruling gave list-based texting more room. But in January 2023 the FCC tightened the other side, saying a so-called peer-to-peer platform still needs consent if it can dial numbers without a person actively and affirmatively dialing each one. A human sitting somewhere in the workflow is not enough. The human has to be doing the dialing.
So when a campaign text lands on your phone this morning, its legality depends on a question you cannot answer from your couch: did a volunteer tap send on that exact message, or did software do it while a volunteer watched?
The FCC has put real money behind that reading. In June 2023 the commission fined political operatives John Burkman and Jacob Wohl, along with J.M. Burkman & Associates LLC, $5,134,500 for 1,141 prerecorded calls to wireless numbers. The respondents argued the calls were permissible because they were political. The forfeiture order rejected that argument. Political speech did not excuse the absence of consent.
The order also settles a question every recipient should hold onto. When consent is disputed, the burden is on the sender to show it was obtained. Not on you to prove you never gave it.
That cuts against a lazy assumption on both sides of this fight. A phone number sitting in a voter file or on a purchased list is not the same thing as consent to be robotexted by a particular campaign, and a campaign that wants to claim otherwise has to produce the evidence. It also means that the question worth asking any candidate whose messages are filling your phone today is a simple one: show me where I agreed to this.
The FCC strengthened opt-outs in February 2024. Under those rules, you can revoke consent by any reasonable method, including replying STOP, and the sender has to honor it within no more than 10 business days. Confirmation is limited to a single text.
The catch is scope. The commission has explained that those revocation rules apply to robocalls and robotexts for which consent was required in the first place. A message that falls under an exemption may require a separate, explicit request to stop. Reply STOP to an autodialed campaign text and the law is on your side. Reply STOP to a text a volunteer sent by hand, and you are relying on the campaign's manners.
That is the hole a working opt-out would have to fill. Not a ban on campaigns texting, but a rule that says once a Rhode Islander has said no, the answer is no regardless of which software delivered the message.
Here the local contrast gets sharp. Rhode Island's Telephone Sales Solicitation Act, § 5-61-3.5 , bars certain unsolicited text-message advertisements sent to state residents. The statute defines a covered advertisement by its purpose: promoting the sale or disposition of real estate, goods, services or credit. A furniture store that texts you a Labor Day sale without permission is on the wrong side of state law, with the Department of the Attorney General named as the enforcing agency.
A candidate asking you for $25 before the polls close is on no side of that law at all. The definition does not reach political appeals, endorsements or get-out-the-vote messages.
Rhode Island's election code does touch political messaging, but only for transparency. Section 17-25.3-3 requires "paid for by" disclosures on certain independent-expenditure communications and imposes identification and donor-disclosure requirements on certain automated telephone calls. Those are rules about who is talking. Nothing in state law gives the person on the receiving end a way to make it stop.
The strongest argument against a political-text law is constitutional, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal.
In Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants in 2020, the Supreme Court struck down a TCPA exception that allowed robocalls to collect government-backed debt, because favoring that speech over political and other speech was a content-based distinction the First Amendment does not tolerate. The Court then did something the political consultants who brought the case did not want: it severed the bad exception and left the general cell-phone robocall restriction standing. The decision did not hand campaigns an exemption. It removed a privilege someone else had.
The lesson for the General Assembly is about design. A law that singles out political texts for a ban invites exactly the content-based challenge Barr describes. A law built on neutral features does not carry the same vulnerability: automated delivery, volume, sender identification, reasonable hours, and above all an enforceable rule that a recipient's direct opt-out request must be honored by whoever sent the message. Rhode Island already regulates commercial texts by their commercial purpose. Extending an opt-out right to every unsolicited campaign text, regardless of how it was sent, is a smaller step than it sounds.
Congress could do the same thing nationally by amending the TCPA to erase the manual-versus-automated distinction for opt-out requests. The FCC could reach part of the way through rulemaking. The TCPA also lets state attorneys general bring civil actions on behalf of their residents, which means Rhode Island's Attorney General already has a federal enforcement tool for the automated texts that do require consent.
Anyone hoping Washington drifts toward more protection should read what the FCC published on Friday. The commission is seeking comment on a petition from Club for Growth asking for permission to place noncommercial political calls to wireless numbers, including calls with AI-generated voices, without prior express consent. It is a petition, not a rule, and it concerns voice calls rather than texts. It is also a clear statement of where the political-consulting industry wants the line to move, and it is not toward your side of the phone.
So the question for Rhode Island lawmakers when they return to Smith Hill is not whether they can stop candidates from talking to voters. They cannot, and they should not try. The question is narrower and harder to argue against: whether a Rhode Islander who has said stop gets the same respect from a campaign that state law already demands from a mattress store.
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