ElectionLeaflets.org

One of the reasons I’m not able to blog for this website more actively or help Richard with coding is that I am kayak diving in Ireland and only have the evenings.

This gives me a chance to see how they do electioneering in another country.

In Ireland the parties invest a great deal of money in content free posters depicting a colour portrait of the candidate beside the words “Vote No. 1″ cable-tied to every lamp post as high as ladders can reach.

There were hundreds of them everywhere you looked in Dublin, like Xmas decorations. They thin out slightly in the back of beyond. This is a telegraph pole in Schull.

I don’t know the history of election posters. It turns out that the practice is highly regulated to the extent that they are exempted from the litter laws for 30 days before and 7 days after the election. Outside of this time frame you get fined 150 Euros per poster, which comes out of the election expenses. Before the latest regulations you could put posters up months before the election, but now they go up overnight — probably to bagsie the best spots.

The posters are not paper, they are a sort of corrugated plastic sandwich impregnated with the image on one side to withstand six weeks of Irish weather. The Green Party attempted to use wood, but their 12,000 posters procured at around 10 Euros each started to split.

Some people have tried collecting photos of posters, but I don’t think it’s going to be as fun as scanning election leaflets for TheStraightChoice.org, because they’re all the same and they say nothing. It’s practically impossible to do anything illegal with the content of these posters. Would it be illegal to put the face of someone a lot prettier on your campaign poster? Then everyone votes for the beautiful picture (what other information do they have to go on?), and feels cheated when they see an ugly guy with the same name show up on the night of the election.

Election posters are an arms race. If one party puts them up all over town, then they all have to. I wonder if they should be banned totally in order to free up party resources for different forms of electioneering, such as delivering leaflets that contain hundreds of words intended to convey complex information.

In the UK we don’t have them. There are strict laws against putting up advertisements of any kind on public property, and there are no special exemptions for election material, as there is in Ireland of from the anti-litter laws. The practice is not established. And under Section 109 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 it is illegal to pay for election notices to be put up somewhere unless it is the ordinary business “to exhibit for payment bills and advertisements”. That means that established commercial bill-boards are okay, but you can’t build a load of special ones just for the election.

But one should not take the law too seriously as the source of our traditions. The law is merely the codification of our traditions in such a way as to regulate out the really bad bits.

And in our country, hand-delivered leaflets are the key for winning elections. It’s not web-pages, emails, or facebook groups — if it were, then we would see some form of regulation of them by now.

Maybe in the future someone will work out how to win votes using internet technology, and then law-makers will start to pay attention to it — partly because they would have won their seats by using such tricks, and they’ll understand it, and they’ll want to pull the ladder up after them by banning anyone else from using the same tactics. So far, attempts to harness for force of the internet to political advantage have failed. It’s not clear why.

In the United States they’ve got two further really powerful tools we’ve not got. These are 30 second radio and TV ads, and push-polling which is often done using phone banks and recorded voices.

I don’t know if automated phoning up people with recorded messages (known as robocalling) is illegal in the UK. You can see it would work because people always interrupt what they are doing in order to take a phone call, which means it’s accessing a higher priority communications channel.

If the technique spreads across the Atlantic, then we’re going to need another project to record and archive them, because they have been known to include amazing acts of deception. As usual, those who are not deceived get used to ignoring them, which means their target is self-selecting.

It cannot be stressed enough that election campaigning material matters to us all. It’s not like the dodgy pensions company salesmen, where if you see through their lies and tell them to get stuffed, they’ll go away and rip off your neighbour instead. It’s only years down the line, and when it’s done on a massive enough scale, that you are liable to the cost through your taxes. But most of the time it’s not your problem.

But in an election the problem is yours, because if your neighbours are deceived out of their honest votes, then you have to live with the candidate they selected.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. We have to keep in mind that election campaigns are waged across different media channels, each of which has its own characteristic uses and abuses.

In Britain a primary channel has been for many years the party election leaflet. It’s got a lot of advantages over the other media channels (phone calls, TV ads, posters bearing the candidate’s portrait, or doorstepping), because it is accessible to any political party, and can contain actually relevant information.

Let’s try to take them seriously, and do what we can to make them good.