The government has said it's legal for political campaigns to send text messages seeking votes or contributions. According to the Federal Trade Commission, under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, political texts are the equivalent of non-commercial bulk mail — and "protected under the First Amendment."

That didn't stop a McKinney man from suing Beto O'Rourke's campaign for the stream of texts it's been sending for months on behalf of the candidate, who's challenging Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate.

The Friday before early voting began, the Dallas-based attorney representing Sameer Syed filed in Dallas federal court a would-be class-action lawsuit over the seemingly unstoppable texts that ask the receiver to vote for the El Paso congressman.

Just one Beto O'Rourke text. Easily deleted.

Syed doesn't just want the texts to stop. He also wants "at least $500 per phone call/text message," along with other damages.

Syed's attorney, Shawn Jaffer, contends that the texts violate the Federal Communication Commission's 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, meant to keep phones free of telemarketers — whose calls have seemingly proliferated in recent months, despite the federal law.

The lawsuit says O'Rourke's campaign has sent at least nine texts to Syed's two cellphones.

And when he tried to call them back, the suit reads, "all calls resulted in error messages or disconnected dial tones. This illustrates that text messages did not originate from cellular phones but came from an automated telephone dialing system."

That, says the suit, violates the protection act.

The FCC says political robotexts fall under robocall rules. That is: "As text messages generally go to mobile phones, they require the called party's prior express consent if they are generated using autodialing."

O'Rourke's communications director, Chris Evans, disagrees. He told Mashable on Monday that "our grass-roots volunteer program with thousands of Texans canvassing, phone banking, texting and organizing is the largest this state has seen. It is fully compliant with the law."

Hugh Brady, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Texas Tribune this year that the TCPA and other anti-spam laws don't apply to the text messages.

"Those laws only apply to commercial messages, and these are not commercial messages because they're not proposing a commercial transaction," Brady said.

I just delete these messages — thought I did, anyway. After I saw the suit I found two old texts — one from a "Susan" in April, from a 737 area code, and another in May from "Steve" using a 469 number. When I called Susan on Monday, it rang through to a generic outbound message about the person not being available to talk. Steve's number rang until it collapsed in a heap of beep-beep-beeps.