Unsolicited text messages from political campaigns: The fight to keep them out of your phone.

The crime, as Goodstein saw it, was sending unsolicited text messages to voters. Goodstein had been investigating the case ever since he read a press account of a Democrat in upstate New York who received an unwanted appeal on her phone in 2009 from a Republican congressional candidate. Before the 2010 midterms, Goodstein catalogued other examples of similar contact in congressional races.