Nope. No land line at all, actually. And we have separate mobiles with 2 different carriers.

Are you sure the pamphlets were labelled at all? Because 80% of the stuff we get just goes to every letterbox they can find. And normally its not even the Swiss Post distributing it but in fact dedicated party member from your community that go around leafleting.

However, what out community does - and that's probably not the same everywhere - is that before every referendum / election we get one big envelope from the Gemeinde containing one pamphlet from each party so we can "inform" ourselves. I think the idea is that you should get only one big envelope and that's it but of course if the local partyfolk go around distributing their rubbish it doesnt help... And also just because they give you one envelope doesnt mean that they gave out address information to the parties.


Well, you can't of course just mail everything back - well you can but it costs you. But what most parties do before elections is to make sure they have a fun peoples initiatives on the go that they are collecting votes for. Often they are a bit pointless because they are addressing issues that are already accounted for. Good example is the SVP's 2nd expulsion initative. Or the Greens AntiNuclear initiative. These could be seen as a clever form of advertising because it engages the voter with the topic and makes it much more obvious what the party stands for. Happens quite often that after the election these initiatives get quietly dropped or abandoned.

Now those parties that can afford it - SVP - usually dont just send you silly cheap leaflet but a little brochure with a bit attached where you can add your signature to the required pool of 100 000 and then send back. These usually come with a prepaid label thingy. I wasn't aware of this but when a few years ago SVP started this tactic and send pre-paid signature forms to every household in the country, the young greens released a press statement saying basically - if you hate SVP more than you hate foreigners, why not just return the forms empty since it costs the party a stamp each time someones does so - so if one in seven swiss households return the silly brochures, we just cost them 1 000 000.- for nothing. So since they got me that idea I usually enjoy doing so. If its a completely stupid initative you can even add a non-existing name to the list - or if you're not eligible your own - because when they get to 100 000 every single name will have to be checked and its rather funny and embarrassing if 5% turned out to be not eligible and they only have 98 000 - happened all before!