Before you Bin those Leaflets

With the upcoming local elections, you're probably going to get quite a few letters and leaflets through the post. Your first instinct might be to immediately bin them, but even if you do that, uploading it to electionleaflets.org would be good, for several reasons:

• Archival: Particularly in local elections, most wards have a most a few thousand people, and election communication can be lost. Uploading leaflets you receive will ensure that it's not lost to time.
• Accountability: Especially on a local level, if candidates make promises to get elected and then break them, there often isn't any concrete proof of the promise they made, because the leaflets haven't been preserved. Uploading leaflets you receive provides concrete proof of the promises they've made, so if they break them they can properly be held to account.
• Interest: Beyond more direct purposes, it's interesting to see how parties campaign differently depending on where they are - what their priorities are, the messages they use and even little things like how the leaflets are designed. Uploading leaflets keeps that information available even years after the fact.

electionleaflets.org is volunteer-run and are not affiliated with a political party. They do some great work, gathering information from all over the UK, and contributing to their archives would be great.

(Right, having posted that now off to the scanner with the one's we've had so far.)