Freesteel Blog » Election Communication drop-off

Election Communication drop-off

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 11:07 am Written by:

One of the reasons I know slightly more than bugger all about election leaflets is that I have been drafted into participating in the process. Last week Becka handed over £500 for the deposit to stand as a candidate — and then she decided she wanted it back, which means she needs to score at least 5% of the vote.

We don’t have time to deliver leaflets and canvass in the constituency because it’s not a target seat. The policy of all parties, especially the LibDems, is “Target to Win”. It’s the only tactic to use in the current electoral system. Nobody cares if you take a few thousand extra votes off a candidate in a safe seat. But if you get that last 150 to take the majority, that makes all the difference.

But free is good. And there is Section 91 of the Representation of the People Act 1983: Candidate’s right to send election address post free

Becka learned about this last week, and asked me to look at the rules:

Your Election sort mailing must be:
* 100% full addressed and accurately postcoded
* Facing the same way and the same way up.
* Pre-sorted and bundled by individual postal delivery walk.
* Bundled in 100s only
* All bundled must be banded using elastic or paper bands.
* All bundles must be presented in bags must be double and cross-banded, bundles presented in boxes can be single banded.
* Each bundle should contain items for a single delivery walk only, must be labelled according to walk name and must not contain anything other than your election mail
* Bundles containing less than 10 items must be single banded
* No separate bundles for absent voters
* Candidate mailings presented in boxes or bags must not weight in excess of 11kg
* etc. etc. etc.

No way! Much too hard. All the Tory party blue A3 leaflets of the same form have been delivered this way, because they get the scale and have the databases.

More realistically, there is an Unaddressed delivery option.

Becka had to give 48 hours notice for the post office to approve the leaflet. The words “Election Communication” must appear on the face of it, and it must relate to the election (so you can’t use this service as a cheap way to deliver commercial junk mail).

Then she spent all Saturday running the risograph to make 10,000 leaflets (while I was down in London at OKCon). We fetched them by car into the sorting office on Monday morning.

One of the piles of leaflets in the back of the car fell over as we turned the first corner.

Bundling into 100s? Putting into 11kg boxes? Did someone actually read the instructions?

A very nice lady in the sorting office found us a crate of rubber bands to make amends, as well as some post office bags to put them into. The other parties meanwhile made their deliveries of masses and masses of properly labeled and sorted boxes like real pros.

I await evidence from TheStraightChoice if any of these deliveries have gotten through.

You know, this is probably something useful for other parties who want to know if their leaflets are getting through.

2 Comments

  • 1. AlasdairGF replies at 27th April 2010, 12:34 pm :

    I await with interest – today for the first time I was leafleted by UKIP & the Tories, first leaflets that weren’t Lab or LD!

  • 2. Freesteel&hellip replies at 29th April 2010, 10:51 am :

    […] few days ago, Becka invoked part (a), the unaddressed delivery, one per […]

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