As election season ramps up, so do political text messages and emails. How to protect against spam.

If you feel like you're drowning in a sea of text alerts and desperate email pleas for "just $5" this election season, you are far from alone.

In the final sprint to the polls ahead of the March 17 primary elections in Illinois, political campaigns have shifted their outreach into overdrive.

"It's a situation where people are being bombarded with emails; especially emails that they never signed up for," said Abrar Qureshi, of WIllowbrook.

Qureshi said he hasn't just gotten a couple of political emails asking him to donate to campaigns.

"I received over 250 emails claiming to be the Democratic Party," he said.

Those emails have asked for donations to the Democratic National Committee and Democratic candidates. Quereshi received were so many of them, he worried they were phishing and was afraid to click on them.

"I never signed up for the Democratic Party emails, and I was wondering, how is it that they got ahold of my emails?" he said.

It turns out the answer is almost anywhere.

"So think about, you know, the next time you go to a grocery store and you put in your phone number or your email address. They might be selling that information, as well as sending you coupons," said Eric Wilson, executive director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, a research and development lab. "I think it's important that your viewers know that it's not necessarily the campaigns or the parties sending those messages to them, but list brokers."

Wilson said "list brokers" can gather people's contact information from almost anywhere, including public records, past donations, and even commercial transactions.

The Center for Campaign Innovation polling found 67% of voters received text messages, 56% of voters said they received emails, 34% found these campaign messages "excessive" or "overkill," and 21% reported feeling "annoyed, irritated, or frustrated."

Even so, campaigns are exempt from certain consumer protection laws because of the First Amendment, but there are ways to protect your inbox.

"It starts with being careful about who you give your email and phone number to," Wilson said.

Wilson recommended giving out secondary email addresses and virtual phone numbers for political activities. If you're already being targeted aggressively, unsubscribe where you can, mark persistent emails as spam, and forward unwanted texts to 7726, which spells SPAM, to help carriers block the third-party brokers.

Meanwhile, Qureshi thinks we should have to opt in, not out, of such messages.

"They should at least, you know, get permission," he said.