The restrictiveness of publicity regulations is also a topic with lots of myths.
Complexity of election regulations
The election (specifically, publicity) regulations are often said to be complex and difficult to understand. This is then used as an excuse, or as an explanation (by the culprit or by other parties), when these regulations are broken.
To prove that this is not necessarily the case, this page contains some short summaries of the current publicity regulations.
The three-word summary
Ask the SRO
The one sentence summary
Ask the Senior Returning Officer before doing anything (other than having private conversations with your friends) that might influence who someone votes for.
The one paragraph summary
Almost everything that might influence who someone votes for must be approved by the Senior Returning Officer and the candidate(s) concerned before it is used or done, with an exception for private conversations between people who know each other. Removing publicity is not allowed. If you want to help a candidate's campaign, talk to the candidate first to make sure that they are happy with you joining their campaign team, and check with the Senior Returning Officer that your campaign idea is allowed.
If it's that simple, how come there's 2000-odd words of publicity regulations?
- It's not quite that simple, but for anyone other than the candidates, the summary is sufficient. The vast majority of (unintentional) breaches of election regulations are not carried out by the candidates themselves.
- A large amount of it is to define what publicity the Senior Returning Officer may and may not approve. All anyone other than the SRO has to know is that only approved publicity can be used.
- Another large section (the campaign team rules) is to protect candidates from claims that someone breaking the rules was acting on their behalf, and to allow candidates to have help in campaigning. Even campaign team members probably only need to know the summaries.
- For ease of interpretation, it needs to be written very precisely. This inevitably increases the word count. For example, the publicity limits (distribution and expenditure) take a lot of space to define precisely, but are of little interest to anyone other than the Senior Returning Officer and the candidates.