I did the thing you are supposed to do. On October 28 I called the number, 1-888-382-1222, and confirmed what I already believed: my phone number is on the National Do Not Call Registry. On the record. Checked and verified, the way you are told to check it.
Then, inside the same hour, my phone buzzed twice. Political texts. Six days before an election.
Nothing went wrong. No law was broken. The system worked exactly the way it was written to work. That is the whole problem, because the people who wrote it wrote themselves out of it.
Two sets of rules
From this side of the phone, what is the difference between a telemarketer and a campaign?
Both got your number from somewhere you did not hand it to them. Both interrupt your day on their schedule, not yours. Both want something from you.
Here is the only difference I can find. A telemarketer has to respect the Do Not Call list. A campaign does not. Political campaigns are exempt from the registry. Not overlooked. Not a loophole somebody forgot to close. Exempt, on purpose, in writing, by the same people who told you the list would protect you.
Consider the size of that. There are 258.5 million numbers registered on the list, according to the FTC's figures for fiscal 2025. Two hundred fifty-eight million people did what they were told to do. In that same year, more than 2.6 million complaints came in from registered people who got called anyway. California filed the most complaints of any state in the country, over 300,000 of them. An estimated 3.9 billion robocalls went out in September 2026 alone, and the unwanted texts run past 225 billion a year.
A registry you can opt out of is a courtesy. A registry the powerful exempted themselves from is something else. It is a rule for you and a pass for them.
Where they got your number
What surprised me most was not that they call. It was where they got the number to call.
You never gave it to them. You did not sign up as a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent and ask to hear from campaigns. You did not check a box that said please text me about candidates. You did not request any of it. And still your number sits in campaign hands as if you had handed it over yourself.
In California, in a way, you did. You just were not told. Elections Code section 2194 requires counties to hand voter data, phone number included, to campaigns. Read that again slowly. The same law that calls your voter information confidential requires that it be given to the very people who then call and text you about your vote. Confidential, and handed over, in the same breath.
Your number does not leak. It is delivered, by law, to the people who use it.
And once it is in circulation, it does not stay in one place. It moves the way data moves now, from list to list, buyer to buyer, cycle to cycle. One act of registering to vote becomes a lifetime subscription you never agreed to.
So the exemption is only half the story. The other half is the supply line. The state collects your information for one purpose, running elections, and the law pipes it to campaigns for another. You were never asked. You were never the customer in that transaction. You were what got handed over.
The penalties are a rumor
And if somebody breaks the rules that do exist? The FTC has ordered more than two billion dollars in penalties over the years. Ordered. Not collected. There is a difference, and the difference is most of the money.
The biggest penalty ever actually paid was DISH, 210 million dollars, and that took eleven years of litigation to collect. The FCC's record fine, 225 million dollars, is one the FCC itself cannot collect.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is just arithmetic. If the fine is a rumor and the exemption is a statute, the phone keeps ringing.
How to stop it
So what do you actually do? You cannot repeal an exemption from your kitchen table. But you are not helpless, and this is not hopeless. The supply lines can be cut in the places you can reach, and the pressure can be raised in the one place they have to publish. Three moves.
First, pull your number out of the voter file. The state voter form itself carries an option to remove your telephone number. That is the headwaters, the record the counties are required to hand over. Take the number off it, and the biggest delivery stops at the source.
Second, cut the brokers. California's DROP system lets you order your information deleted from the data brokers. That is the second pipe feeding the same flood: the lists that get bought, sold, and passed along long after any single election is over. One deletion order reaches the part of the circulation you cannot see.
Third, file the complaint. Every time. Even knowing the collection record. Even when it feels like shouting into a well. The complaint count is the one number they publish, and more than 300,000 complaints from California in a single year is the kind of number that cannot be ignored forever. Your complaint is a receipt, and receipts add up.
None of this is dramatic. All of it is documented. That is the point. You cannot end the exemption today, but you can make your number harder to hand over, harder to sell, and every unwanted contact harder to pretend is not happening.
What it costs you
None of this is about one text. One text costs you nothing. That is how it gets past you.
It is the little things amounting to bigger things. A buzz during a conversation. A buzz during a meal. A buzz while you are driving, while you are working, while you are sitting with somebody you love. Thirty seconds here, a minute there. Add it up across a day, across a year, across 258.5 million registered numbers, and it is a tax nobody voted on, collected in the only currency you cannot earn back. Your attention. Your day, taken thirty minutes at a time, in pieces too small to fight over.
That is what "do not call" was supposed to mean. Not just the salesmen. Anything you did not personally sign up for. If I did not ask for it, do not call. If I did not ask for it, do not text. It is a simple sentence. It only gets complicated when the people it would apply to are the ones holding the pen.
The fight back is receipts
In my version, the rule covers everybody, including the people who write rules. And when somebody violates it, they do not pay a fine into some distant government account that never gets collected. They pay the person they bothered. Directly. No lawyer in the middle, no middleman, no eleven years of litigation to maybe see a dime.
Until that day, the fight is not rage. Rage burns out by lunch. The fight is receipts.
I run a small studio that works for small businesses, and we live by a short rule here: proof, not promises. The registry was a promise. I checked mine, on the record, and my phone buzzed twice inside the hour. So cut the lines you can reach, file the complaint every time, and keep asking the only question that matters.
From this side of the phone, what is the difference?
Brad Frederick
Chairman, Frederick Studios
