Every election season, the same thing happens. Phones ring at dinnertime. A recorded voice launches into a pitch for a candidate, a ballot measure, or a donation. Between the calls, the text messages arrive in a steady drip, each one warning that a deadline is hours away, that a “match” is about to expire, that a $5 gift is the only thing standing between the country and catastrophe. The number is unfamiliar, but the person on the receiving end has no legal recourse. Meanwhile, the same consumer’s phone is protected from a prerecorded sales call by a two-decade-old national registry, a federal statute with statutory damages, and a plaintiffs’ bar that files hundreds of class actions a month.
On September 8, 2026, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) introduced H.R. 10310, the Robo Calls Off Phones Act, or the “Robo COP Act,” which would finally close that gap. The Ecommerce Innovation Alliance applauds the Congresswoman for taking on a problem that Washington has managed to ignore for more than twenty years.
What the bill does
The Robo COP Act is short and direct. It directs the Federal Trade Commission, within 180 days of enactment and “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” to revise the do-not-call provisions of the Telemarketing Sales Rule to prohibit “politically-oriented recorded message telephone calls” to any number on the National Do Not Call Registry.
The bill defines a covered call narrowly. It must be an outbound call in which no live person is available to speak with the person answering and the call instead plays a recorded message, and it must either have the purpose of promoting, advertising, campaigning, or soliciting donations for or against a candidate or political issue, or include the name of a political candidate. Live calls from volunteers are untouched. Calls to people who have not registered on the Do Not Call list are untouched. The bill simply gives consumers who have already told the federal government they do not want prerecorded calls the ability to have that choice respected by political callers, too.
Rep. Foxx has been pursuing this idea across multiple Congresses. In February 2015, she co-introduced the original Robo COP Act (H.R. 827) with then-Rep. David Jolly (R-FL), who deserves credit for helping put the issue on the table more than a decade ago. As Jolly said at the time, “Bottom line, many consider the bombardment of political robocalls to be an invasion of privacy and this legislation protects that privacy.” Foxx reintroduced the bill as H.R. 805 in 2019, and her framing has been consistent throughout: “The Robo COP Act would eliminate a special carveout for political campaigns, making politicians play by the same rules as everyone else who makes robocalls.” Or, as she put it in 2015, “politicians made sure to exempt political robocalls from the power of the Do Not Call Registry.”
The carveout consumers never asked for
Most Americans assume that signing up for the Do Not Call Registry means they will stop getting robocalls. It does not. The FCC’s own consumer guidance confirms that political campaigns are exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry, and that autodialed and prerecorded political calls to residential landlines are permitted without any prior consent at all, subject only to a cap of three calls in any 30-day period that took effect in 2023. Political callers also fall outside the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule, which is why the Robo COP Act has to reach the FTC’s rules directly.
The registry itself is enormously popular. As of September 30, 2025, more than 258 million phone numbers were registered, and consumers filed over 2.6 million Do Not Call complaints in fiscal year 2025 alone. Yet if you open the FTC’s Do Not Call Data Book, you will not find a single line for political calls, because the agency does not have the authority to do anything about them. Consumers are complaining about a category of calls the complaint system cannot even see.
The intrusion is real, and consumers are telling regulators about it
The scale of political outreach is staggering. According to Robokiller data reported by NBC News, Americans received more than 15 billion political text messages in 2022, roughly 50 per phone, and the FCC’s own complaint records showed that unwanted political texts were the largest single group of text message complaints that year. By July 2024, YouMail reported that there had already been more political texts in 2024 than in all of 2023, and by early October roughly half of all automated texts in the country were political, according to reporting in Washingtonian.
Voice traffic follows the same seasonal pattern. YouMail’s Robocall Index documented a 10 percent surge in spam calls in October 2024 driven by the election. Consumers are not shy about how they feel. A survey of 1,100 active political donors cited by Washingtonian found only a quarter likely to give again, with respondents describing the constant outreach as “a shakedown” and one asking that it be made “illegal to keep texting the same number once they’ve unsubscribed.” Even the academics who pioneered political texting concede the point. Menlo College dean Melissa Michelson told TIME, “like many people, I am annoyed by how many of them I get.” And this summer, NPR reported that AI-driven campaign messaging is about to make the volume higher, not lower, heading into the 2026 midterms.
The donation text barrage
If prerecorded political calls are the most visible intrusion, fundraising texts are the most relentless. The overwhelming majority of political texts are not get-out-the-vote reminders. They are solicitations, and they are engineered to be sent again and again to the same people.
The Washingtonian’s reporting on the 2024 cycle described a practice campaigns call “snowshoeing,” in which a sender simply switches to a new phone number after a recipient unsubscribes, and noted that some operations treat a STOP reply as confirmation that a number is live and worth targeting further. A survey of 1,100 active political donors found only one in four likely to give again. Their own words tell the story: “Needs to be illegal to keep texting the same number once they’ve unsubscribed, just to get more of the same from another number.”
The people bearing the brunt of this are often the least equipped to resist it. CNN’s October 2024 investigation documented how fundraising operations on both sides of the aisle drew millions of dollars from elderly donors, including people with dementia, through relentless, deceptive solicitations. A Stanford analysis published this August found roughly 138,000 “captive” donors, averaging 75 years old, who had each given more than 100 times to fundraising-focused PACs, with one 85-year-old retiree making more than 7,800 donations totaling $648,000, and a 91-year-old in a senior living facility donating more than 25,000 times. Those same PACs spent 70 to 75 cents of every dollar raised on more fundraising, which is to say on more texts.
Any ecommerce business that treated an unsubscribe request the way political fundraisers routinely do would be sued into oblivion. Under the TCPA, a single text sent after a customer says STOP can trigger $500 to $1,500 in statutory damages, multiplied across a class. The FCC has spent years tightening revocation rules for commercial senders, most recently requiring businesses to honor an opt-out made “in any reasonable manner.” Political fundraisers, meanwhile, exploit the peer-to-peer texting loophole, cycle through ten-digit numbers, and face nothing more than the occasional strongly worded news story.
Meanwhile, businesses shoulder the burden
Contrast that with how Washington treats the businesses EIA represents: ecommerce brands and the technology platforms that help them communicate with customers who have affirmatively opted in.
For those businesses, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act carries statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per call or text, with no cap, and no requirement that anyone was actually harmed. That structure has produced an industry of professional litigation. More TCPA class actions were filed in the first quarter of 2026 than in any quarter in history, with a record 283 TCPA suits in March 2026 alone, 220 of them class actions. WebRecon’s February 2026 data showed TCPA filings up nearly 27 percent year over year, and TCPA was the only major consumer statute whose filings rose from January to February.
EIA members live with this every day. They obtain express written consent or scrub against the national DNC registry. They honor opt-outs across every channel. They maintain internal do-not-contact lists. And they still face demand letters and class actions, often over messages that the recipient explicitly asked to receive, as EIA documented in its petition to the FCC on abusive “quiet hours” litigation. Every new state legislative cycle brings proposals to tighten consent standards, expand revocation rules, or add other new state-level restrictions on legitimate, consented-to commercial messaging.
The asymmetry is hard to miss. A brand that texts a customer operates under one of the most heavily litigated consumer statutes in the country. A campaign that robocalls a stranger on the Do Not Call list at 8 p.m. operates under almost none of it. Consumers did not design that system. Politicians did.
Why this matters for EIA and its members
“For twenty years, Congress and states have written robocall rules that apply to everyone except them,” said David Carter of the Ecommerce Innovation Alliance. “Our members obtain consent, honor every opt-out, and still face record class action filings, often over messages their customers asked to receive, because the statute they operate under is vague and overly broad. Politicians should have to live under the same kind of rules they impose on business and feel the consequences when those rules are poorly written. That experience is the fastest route to better policy. The Robo COP Act would be a first step toward asking political callers to respect the same consumer choice that businesses are required to respect, and we strongly support it.”
EIA has never argued that consumers should receive communications they do not want. Our position has always been the opposite: consent should be the foundation of the relationship, and businesses that honor consent should not be treated as lawbreakers. The Robo COP Act is consistent with that principle. It simply extends the choice consumers already made to another area of unwanted calls and texts.
There is also a practical benefit for the entire messaging ecosystem. When consumers are flooded with unwanted political robocalls and texts, they stop trusting their phones. They screen everything, ignore legitimate notifications, and file complaints that regulators then cite as justification for broader restrictions that fall hardest on compliant businesses. Reining in the most complained-about category of calls helps restore consumer confidence in the channel that our members depend on.
What comes next
H.R. 10310 has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. EIA encourages the Committee to give it prompt consideration, and encourages members of both parties to recognize that this is not a partisan issue. Nobody’s constituents enjoy political robocalls. The EIA thanks Rep. Foxx for her persistence on this issue.
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Ecommerce Innovation Alliance provides members with analysis of litigation and regulatory developments affecting online commerce and digital marketing. This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Members with questions about their specific practices should consult counsel.
