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Short code 80810

The number behind a political text program follows the same carrier rules as a retailer's coupon code, and federal law adds a consent requirement of its own.

3 min read

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Written November 8, 2016. Prices and rules may have changed since.

Around the November 2016 election, five- and six-digit codes such as 80810 carried a steady stream of political texts: campaign updates, reminders to vote and requests for donations. The code itself says nothing about who is sending. Texting HELP to it does, because the carriers’ rules require every program to answer with its name and a way to reach it, and the registry that leases the numbers keeps the leaseholder’s details on file.

Stopping the messages

Replying STOP to 80810 ends the program’s texts, and replying HELP brings back contact details for the sender. A political program leases its code from the same registry as any business and runs on the same carrier networks, so the carriers’ rules for short codes apply to it in full. Those rules, set out in CTIA’s Short Code Monitoring Handbook, require every program to honor STOP, END, CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE and QUIT, to send at most one message confirming the opt-out, and to send nothing after that.

When texts keep coming after STOP, there are two places to report it. Forwarding a message to 7726 files a spam report with the recipient’s carrier. A complaint to the Federal Communications Commission can be filed online or by calling 1-888-CALL-FCC.

What federal law says about political texts

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 bars calls to cell phones made with an automatic dialing system unless the call is for an emergency or the person called gave prior express consent. The FCC treats a text message as a call for this purpose, and it made the point to campaigns directly in an enforcement advisory issued in March 2016, ahead of that year’s elections. The advisory’s main points:

  • Autodialed texts to a cell phone need the recipient’s prior express consent, and political campaigns get no exemption.
  • A sender that claims consent has to be able to prove it.
  • Consent can be withdrawn at any time by any reasonable method, spoken or written.
  • Texts typed and sent one at a time by a person, without an autodialer, fall outside that consent rule.
  • The National Do Not Call Registry does not cover political calls, since they are not telephone solicitations.

The text of the statute also gives the person who received an unlawful call or text the right to sue for $500 per violation, and a court can triple that amount when the violation was willful or knowing. Since then, the Republican National Committee has run its text program on 80810 under terms that name it as the sender, and the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Facebook v. Duguid has narrowed which equipment counts as an automatic dialing system.

None of this depends on the content of the messages. The same opt-out and consent rules would apply to any party or campaign texting from a short code.