Pennsylvania Residents Peppered With False Texts Claiming They Already Voted

All kinds of loopy stuff has been taking place as we attain the tip of a protracted and really chaotic presidential election. In Pennsylvania, thought of the battleground state so far as this political race is worried, voters had been just lately 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 legit state authorities web site with polling data.

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

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

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

“We’re asking residents to remain vigilant and watch out with their private data,” stated Jamila H. Winder, chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, in Pennsylvania. “It’s an unlucky actuality that these unhealthy actors understand how necessary voting is to Montgomery County residents and can use that to take advantage of them. We want everybody to remember and shield their private knowledge.”

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 data from state web sites and ignore all the things else.