Election communications

Wed 22 May 2019, 12:46 (last edited on Wed 22 May 2019, 12:58)

To simplify a fairly complex set of rules:

UK legislation allows parties in national and European elections to send one free mailout to every registered voter. The parties usually vary their material by target group.

All they know about each voter, from the Electoral Register they're allowed access to, is their name, address, whether they're over - or just about to be - 18, and their citizenship (not all information on the register is supplied to parties). They can make some sensible conclusions about gender, they can develop, or hire, complex algorithms to guess age and economic status from address and name and they might have concluded from interviewing an individual, or from local knowledge, how they're likely to vote. 

These guesses often turn out inaccurate: at the end of voting on May 2, both the LibDems' and the Tories' computers thought their share of the vote in Charlbury was higher than it turned out to be. 

So in Alice's case, UKIP and Brexit are assuming she's a woman, and might be guessing she's over 60: there's nothing the parties have access to on the electoral register giving them either piece of information. All they see is "Alice Brander", her address, her voting number, the elections her citizenship allows her to vote in: and any other conclusions Party workers might have made about her

About 47 million people are on the national electoral register: producing 47 million pieces of campaigning material is a serious cost for the parties and requires substantial amounts of volunteer time (only the postage is paid for by the taxpayer) - and most parties are strapped for cash and volunteers right now. So a party might mail, or deliver directly, only to a subset of voters. A political campaigner tries only to stimulate potential supporters to vote: some may conclude in the current Euro elections (where turnout is expected to be low) that it would be unwise, as well as unaffordable, to mail or leaflet-drop to everyone.

The declared agent for each party is required to return an account of every penny spent within a month of the poll. In our SE England constituency (pop: c, 9 million) each party may spend up to £450,000 during the campaign - so about 50p per voter. This figure includes spending (if incurred) on office rent and booking halls, agents' salaries, transport, leaflet production, fees for advertising space (incl online), postage and phones.

That money all comes from party members' - or wellwishers' or "supporters" ' - contributions.

It is untrue that "political parties are exempt from Data Protection legislation". But it is true that the detailed regulations derived from the legislation affect political parties slightly differently from commercial organisations. 

As far as managing the election is concerned, The Brexit Party is a "party": it has the same right of access to the electoral register as the Greens or the LibDems. It is also subject to the same data protection laws as the Greens and the LibDems: Farage may not use the mailing list to sell Bitcoin shares. But clearly, given the Farage party's unorthodox management structure, and his cavalier attitude to accepting subsidies from shady characters, UK law about what constitutes a political party is going to need looking at. 

Let's hope all political parties - and all politicians vying for their parties' leadership - agree to review this in time for the next election.