As the primary election battles heat up, many of us are finding that our telephones are ringing much more often than we would like.

They are the automated phone calls — often called robo calls — urging you to vote for a particular candidate. Now if the candidate were truly on the other line, then maybe the call might be worth taking. But listening to a political recording is just a waste of our valuable time. The calls are in intrusion into our homes and our private lives and people have a right to be upset about them.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot we can do. A recent letter to the editor suggested an interesting solution to the bombardment of political phone calls. The letter writer, rightly aggravated by the calls, suggested that recipients vote against any candidate whose campaign includes these irritating and pesky campaign tools.

At first, it sounds like quite a reasonable reaction to protest the disruptions of your household — at almost all hours of the night.

But the plan runs into a snag if both or all of the candidates in a race call you. Maybe a Plan B in such cases would be to vote for the candidate who called you the least number of times.

However, that would also involve keeping track of how many times each candidate called, which could result in extensive extra work for you.

Consequently, the best alternative is just be to hang up.