ElectionLeaflets.org

I was out in the nearby streets hand-delivering individually addressed envelopes containing Green Party election leaflets last night to known postal voters.

These names and addresses are held in the database of the local Green Party councillor John Coyne who is running the campaign, cross referenced against the electoral register which contains information as to who is sending in a postal ballot and who actually bothered to vote in the last election.

There is no point in delivering leaflets to people who have already voted or don’t vote.

The package of propaganda contained the following window notice, ostensibly to save us delivering leaflets onto a place that has already voted whilst simultaneously advertising the Green Party during the leaflet drops I will no doubt be roped into doing over the coming days.

The candidate in this ward is Lewis Coyne, son of the Green councillor, John Coyne. Electoral participation so frequently runs in the family. If they taught this stuff at school maybe more new blood would get involved.

At least young Coyne signed up to be a candidate voluntarily, unlike the son of the former council leader for Liverpool.

A regional election has just been held under the controversial Alternative Vote system in Australia.

Under First Past The Post, which is what we have for the upcoming local elections in the UK, the party that is second in the polls has to harangue the voters intending to vote for the third, fourth and fifth place candidates not to waste their vote on sure losers, but to cast their one and only vote for them if they want to depose the leader.

It is necessarily negative message:

“Vote for me if you want to get rid of him”

Sometimes, to increase their share of the vote, a candidate will lie about their position in the polls, or even falsely inform voters about the voting system.

Under the Alternative Voting system, there isn’t any of this problem, and you have beautiful friendly leaflets, like this one collected by our sister site in Australia:

Yeah, clearly, the Green vote is going to come in third in this particular constituency. And rather than yell at these voters to get real and stop wasting their votes on a loser if they really hate the guy who is in the seat now, they’re told:

“It’s okay. Go ahead and vote for who you believe in. And then, because there can only be one winner, transfer your vote to us as your second preference. We’ll be kind with it.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be in a place where the political parties had to attract your vote for them, rather than drive wedges into the polls while taking for granted their core unquestioning base of people who identify themselves as always casting their vote for a single party throughout their lives?

Finally, here is this extraordinary story involving the former Liverpool council leader (as of last May) who forged his son’s signature as a candidate for the local elections.

Our very good friend and volunteer Ross has just ported the Elections Leaflets site from PHP into Django.

If you don’t know what it means, the effect is we can maintain and improve the site at far less cost and with more speed than before.

Which is handy as we have succeeded in raising no money from the Electoral Commission or the JRRT who have better things to award their grants to than establishing a real-time publicly accessible archive of misinformation and lies that are being told to our fellow citizens who will then out-vote us on everything we hold dear.

For example, I have just uploaded this leaflet, which just came through the post today.

Let’s start with that £91 million number.

The following words came from the lips of Mark Harper MP in Parliament last July.

Many of the cost elements of running the proposed referendum on the alternative vote system will be similar to those for a general election.

The previous Government estimated the cost for conduct elements of the 2010 general election in Great Britain at £82.1 million…

[T]he cost of conduct elements for the proposed referendum will be similar… were it not to be combined with any other polls…

[We]… estimate a saving of £17 million on the conduct costs of the referendum through combination [with another election].

Additionally… the Electoral Commission has estimated that the cost of its own activities in relation to the referendum at £9.3 million.

And by adding the numbers £81million to £9million and neglecting to subtract the £17million because we holding the referendum at the same time as the local elections, as well as ignoring every other parliamentary statement on the matter, you can see how they built up this fraudulently inflated figure.

I covered this claim in detail in my blog last month, and it was already exposed as false during a press conference in February where the campaign refused to disclose where their money came from.

I can guess their money does not come from the sorts of people who would like to see their campaign practices exposed online for scrutiny by people who are not always as stupid as they treat us as.

It’s okay to knowingly publish false information in a political message to win votes, but what you cannot do is defame someone in particular.

As part of the process of legal action being taken over one particular leaflet, I can show off some good documentation of the sequence of events.

This election leaflets website, formerly known as thestraightchoice.org, was the result of my association with the Liverpool Green Party which exposed me to the importance of election leaflets.

The party holds a small enclave in St Michael’s Ward, which the Liverpool LibDems (then the majority party in the city) made it their business to erase from the face of the earth.

I covered an example of a later trick here where they falsely alleged that the Green Party had given up on the campaign.

But there was a leaflet from before the election leaflet website was founded, which had a section like this:

The Liverpool Daily Post has the story:

Liberal Democrat councillor Paul Twigger faces £6,400 defamation bill after homeless slur on Greens

A SENIOR Lib-Dem was hit with a £6,400 bill after agreeing to pay damages to two Green councillors who he alleged had forced homeless people to sleep in the snow.

Cllr Paul Twigger agreed to settle with Cllrs John Coyne and Sarah Jennings, who both represent the St Michaels ward, ahead of a defamation trial.

The case centred around a planning application to use a community building in Lark Lane as an overnight homeless shelter.

The Greens proposed an alternative venue, before Cllr Twigger published a leaflet claiming that “shockingly, the city’s Green councillors refused to allow a local community building to be used, meaning some homeless people were forced to sleep rough in temperatures well below zero.”

The Greens had sought an apology but documents obtained by the Daily Post showed Cllr Twigger’s legal team had claimed justification on the grounds the leaflet’s statement was true.

But before the trial could take place, Cllr Twigger – shadow cabinet member for children’s services and member for Knotty Ash – agreed to pay £6,000 costs and £200 damages each to Cllrs Coyne and Jennings.

The details are actually more interesting.

You have to work backwards from the assumption that these types of smear tactics actually work and that manoeuvring your political opponents into a difficult no-win situations whenever possible can give rise to these opportunities.

St Michaels and Lark Lane Community Association (SMLLCA) is a voluntary organisation which owns and manages a building used as a community centre in Lark Lane within St Michaels Ward.

The executive committee of SMLLCA had offered the use of that building to the City Council’s homeless service so that it could be used overnight to provide a city-wide shelter for rough sleepers at times of extreme cold weather. [The local Green Councillors] were consulted in advance by the Homeless Service and raised no objections.

Use of the building overnight required a planning application for a change of use. [The Councillors] were content that the notification of that application would provide a suitable opportunity for consultation with local residents on the principle of using the centre for cold weather shelter.

There was a strong reaction from local residents and some real and perceived weaknesses in the planning notification increased feelings of mistrust of the City Council. [The local Councillors] attended public meetings and came under pressure to oppose the use of the centre.

Instead of opposing the application, [The local Councillors] sought to ensure that residents had and were seen to have a full opportunity to express their concerns and objections.

So far so good. Why was a city of this size, which was controlled by the Lib Dem party at the time, positioning its emergency homeless shelter some miles from the centre in this particular ward? Surely there were other places being planned.

Here’s a question put down by one of those Green Councillors:

The answer isn’t very interesting. There are lots of facilities being explored. The place in St Michael’s ward is not essential to avoid people sleeping rough in the streets.

But then there’s this question put down by another councillor who does not belong to the Green Party:

The answer detailed the numerous provisions in the city of this size.

But it contained the following unusual final paragraph:

The Green Councillors discovered that this was not the original answer.

Here is the original final paragraph:

As you can see, the council officer who wrote the original answer has put their name to it. That’s the clue. It wasn’t there on the published statement.

Answers that are given anonymously cannot be held accountable. People avoid putting their names onto false statements when they don’t have to. And no one has admitted authorship of that paragraph. But it was undoubtedly part of that chain of events that resulted in that section of a political leaflet.

Now election leaflets are not anonymous documents. By law they need an imprint naming the publisher and the printer.

We should start coding them up in Electionleaflets Mark 2.

In the meantime, here is the court settlement, which obliges there to be an apology in their next leaflet in the next two weeks.

# Important: We need your Support

January 2010: A selection of Election leaflets for the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election have been uploaded to ElectionLeaflets.org (formerly known as TheStraightChoice.org).

Copies of the Phil Woolas’s leaflets from the 2010 General Election that got him into so much trouble can also be found there too, along with many other interesting memories from the campaign.

The LibDem by-election campaign finds it okay to drop the ‘L’-word, on account of the judges having said that:

Phil Woolas had “published several false statements of fact in relation to the Petitioner’s personal character or conduct which he had no reasonable grounds for believing to be true and did not believe to be true.”

The Labour Party leaflets are just bland and talk about sending a message in a bottle to the coalition about the government cuts.

In 2010 their candidate stood in Colne Valley where she delivered some luscious lippy leaflets like so:

(Voters don’t get information about her political career or how she was selected as the Labour Party candidate in this by-election from her leaflets or website, presumably because it’s none of their business and their votes can be taken for granted.)

And the Tories are delivering expensive A2 size folded colour prints, which included this particular graphic…

…which corresponds to the one in Woolas’s 2010 leaflets…

…and are both obviously derivations of the frequently used LibDem two horse graphic:

The practice of mucking around with each other’s graphics does give an indication as to the intensity of the campaign.

What next?

These horse-race graphics are telling you about our First-Past-The-Post electoral system.

As you know, there is a national referendum on the question of changing the UK’s voting system coming up this May.

Different voting systems favour or disfavour particular political interests in different ways.

The purpose of a political party is to win elections, so they are always going to campaign for the voting system that happens to favour them more (and disfavour them less).

If the balance in favour is perceived by the public to be fairer, then they are going to be able to campaign for it openly — because making things more fair is an essential ingredient of any public campaign.

But if the public believes that the electoral system favours you in an unfair manner, you’re going to have to campaign for it discretely — because winning General Elections is of a higher priority than any other long-term interests in society.

Discrete campaigning can manifest in the form of strange front groups, which politicians may deny any connection to, who deliver interesting leaflets like so:

Would you like to know about these interesting campaign leaflets as they get delivered to millions of households across the country in real time?

You do?

Well…

ElectionLeaflets.org Needs Your Support Now!

 

We need:

• Media publicity in order to increase the number and spread of leaflets uploaded
• A modest amount of cash to pay for computers, bandwidth and programming hours
• Vocal encouragement and support, because it’s a lot of work when it comes down to it

We’ve obviously tried everything — without any success — and raised no money from outside sources.

We’ve got some pretty good ideas about where money could come from, and have tried them all.

The pots of money which could be used to fund an election leaflet monitoring project in the public interest, could easily be obtained out of:

• The £1.5million ESRC academic grant for the British Election Study

• The £1million spent by the Joseph Roundtree Reform Trust on Power2010, or the £500,000 on TakeBackParliament and YesToFairerVotes. (Yes, we have applied to them many times; someone is going to have to have words with them on our behalf)

• About 10% of the value of the £150,000-300,000 grants that have been awarded by the Electoral Commission in the past.

If you believe that election leaflets should be monitored by the public and published on the internet for posterity, please consider sending letters or emails to the above institutions (and any others that could be argued as having an interest), telling them to get in contact with us as soon as possible so that we don’t lose this moment.

Reasonable letters from unknown members of the public do make a difference, in the way that letters from the usual suspects, like ourselves, do not.

As promised, we now have:

• Fully zoomable mosaic images of the three party leaders. Use as you wish. Thanks to Donovan Hide
• Dynamic map of leaflets by constituency for zooming and exploring the granularity of the election. Thanks to Martin Green
• The words that went with my presentation

Read about it on the Guardian here.

The slides for the presentation are embedded below. But the three key points out of it are:

How dirty was the Election Ground War?

By The Straight Choice
Updated 30th April 2010

PRESS EVENT LIVERPOOL: Tuesday 4th May 2010 @ 12 noon

The Liverpool John Moores University’s Art and Design Academy for Reception

• Revealing which party ran the dirtiest election leaflet of the 2010 campaign – and who ran the best
• The results of a three-day open and public online judging competition for the best and worst at thestraightchoice.org
• American Indians, Paedophiles, Margaret Thatcher and more: the strange side of the 2010 elections.

Over the last few months, hundreds of volunteers have been collecting the debris of the election battle. They’ve painstakingly scanned and uploaded over 4000 election leaflets from all parties and all regions to www.thestraightchoice.org.

These leaflets are silent witnesses to the real fight over how we will be ruled. Not party leader debates, but deceitful bar charts. Not prime time TV broadcasts, but personal attacks on other candidates.

The Straight Choice will present a detailed analysis and a dissection of the tides of the four-week long war.

• Which constituency was carpet-bombed with leaflets, and where was there a tactical withdrawal?
• Whose picture was mysteriously missing from his own party’s leaflets?
• Theatres of war — immigration, pensions, free bus passes
• Clegg, Cameron and Brown in a mosaic of leaflets as big as the room (available in high resolution for distribution)
• Prizes for finest and most despicable leaflets

Julian Todd – Senior Civil Hacker says “These spent shells of the campaign were never meant to be seen online. We’ve left our cameras running, and on
Tuesday we can show the newsreel of the ground war.”

How the leaflets are being judged?

Political enthusiasts are being encouraged to test the political leaflets from all major parties. Users will mark the leaflets on positivity, quality, concentration on local issues – and whether or not the leaflets tell fibs and with a league table showing the results. You can join in online here.

Election Leaflet Analysis

About The Straight Choice – #thesc #ge10

The Straight Choice is a real-time election leaflet project founded in 2008. It presents a live visualization of the flood of party political leaflets as they are delivered across the country during an election campaign.

The name of the website is derived from a leaflet in the controversial by-election in Bermondsey in 1983 which has become the type specimen of accusations of dodgy campaigning. The project was founded by Richard Pope and Julian Todd, and is entirely run by volunteers.

For interview, comment or more info contact Aine McGuire on 07710 377929. To book a place at the event email: team@thestraightchoice.org

Twitter: @thesc

(Sponsored by ScraperWiki.com)

COMMITTEE ON STANDARDS IN PUBLIC LIFE

Committee on standards in public life Michael Crick

My attention has been drawn to Michael Crick’s Written Evidence to the Eleventh Inquiry by the Committee on Standards in Public Life dated 13 April 2006:

I understand you are undertaking a review of the work of the Electoral Commission, to see how it might develop in future. Please can I make a small suggestion?

How about getting the EC to set up a library of election literature? I suggest this should involve amending the law to oblige all candidates and partiels to submit one (or more?) copies of everything they publish to the EC’s new library. I recommend that this should not just include traditional election addresses and leaflets, but also copies of all modern campaign publications – the DVDs and videos which parties often issue to voters these days; all pages on websites promoting canidates and parties; copies of posters which parties erect on public billboards; newspaper ads; and the set scripts which party phone banks use in telephone canvassing. Such a national and public collection would have a number of advantages.

First, it woudl make it much easir for the EC itself, as well as parties, candidates, the media and the general public, to monitor how much activity is going on in each constituency and nationally, and whether parties really are sticking to the rules, particularly those on spending limits. As you may know from contact I had with your committee in Lord Nolan’s time, I believe spending limits have been grossly abused in the past.

Second, I believe it would keep a small check on standards of behaviour by political candidates. For example, constituency campaigns often issue leaflets which masquerade as being published by an opposing party — one example occured in Chris Huhne’s campaign in Eastleigh in 2005, and I am told there have been others, and not just by Lib Dem candidates. I suspect that politicians would be slightly less willing to get up to such tricks if they knew such publications would be on permanent record in the EC library, available for public inspection in perpetuity.

Third, such a libraru would be of huge historic and academic interest, building up a valuable achive of elections in this country, providing an election-by-election tapestry of the issues, candidates and techniques of each campaign. It would be valuable addition to the nation’s heritage.

The new system could be viewed as being in the spirit with the new Freedom of Information obligations on government bodies, only FOIA does not currently apply to political parties.

In a way, the obligation I propose on candidates and parties to submit their material would be similar to the copyright law, whereby any publisher of a new book is obliged to submit one copy of the book to each of the six copyright libraries in the British Isels. Indeed, for all I know, the copyright law may even extend to election literature, though I doubt whether many parties do actually submit their leaflets to the British Library and other copyright libraries.

At the moment there are several academic libraries which collect election literature — the LSA, Bristol University and Brunel University — and a lot of local history libraries collect such material from their localities. But these collections are inevitably patchy and incomplete, especially since parties are under no obligation to respond to such academic requests.

I don’t believe that storing such material need be very expensive for the EC; collecting and keeping it could probably be handled by one person. It would probably involve about 15,000 pieces of paper per election — on a very rough guess of four leaflets per candidate. Indeed, the EC might want to team up with a university for long-term storage.

I think it would be asking too much of the EC to collect literature from local government elections, but it might be possible to apply the same rules to parties and candidates in local government, and make local authorities the collecting bodies, through their local history libraries or local archives.

It’s just a thought, which would fit quite neatly with the EC’s other work. I would be happy to come and discuss it further if you so wish.

What luck! I was able to catch this evening’s Episode 2 of the Vote Now Show with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, in which John FinnemoreElection Leaflets.

The great thing was I was able to get to look up almost every leaflet he referred to on TheStraightChoice as he did his routine. What are the odds of that?

For your convenience, here is the run down in order:

Newcastle upon Tyne Central with the Neutral Newcastle News

Ochil and South Perthshire Banks Account

Brighton Pavilion Don’t back a loser horse race

Edinburgh South horse wearing stethoscope

[Doh! I can't find the David Rowntree boring leaflet on this page. I wonder if Mr. Finnemore lives in that constituency and hasn't bothered to scan and upload it yet!]

Derby North We have pledged to run a positive campaign, unlike some parties. For instance, the Lib Dems are being less than honest.

York Outer The Tory candidate is an unknown ex-councilor from Harrogate.

Selby and Ainsty Daren isn’t afraid of getting dirty.

Paisley and Renfrewshire South I’ve shoveled excrement in five continents.

Great show. Glad we could be of assistance. Now could we please have that last Cities of London and Westminster leaflet uploaded to this site ASAP? I know it’s tedious chore, but we all have to do our bit, you know.

Update: have discovered a poor quality single side of missing leaflet here. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Oh dear, blogging seems to have fallen behind the curve quite radically. It seems everything is happening live on the twitter feeds at a frightening fast rate. I don’t even think I could keep up with it, even with link dumps like this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/apr/06/straight-choice-election-leaflets
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cardiff/2010/apr/06/cardiff-constituency-general-election-2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/leeds/2010/apr/06/general-election-kicks-off-in-leeds
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/StoryBlog.aspx?storycode=6509296
http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/538108.php
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/819909-ukip-can-t-spell-their-own-name
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/04/informative_political_sites.html

As my beat is mostly in Merseyside, I’ll move my coming blog posts to my personal freesteel blog. These will include what’s going down over in Liverpool Wavertree.

We’re looking for correspondents in other areas to watch and report on interesting stuff in local leaflets. Please put them in the twitter feed or email the team. Don’t hesitate. Get the stories out fast. This is the time that matters. Only the votes count.