Hey, candidates – want to cut those political mailing costs? Sure you do. Well, try the simple method used by many famous politicians, like Congressman Jim Mattox, Congressman Jim Collins, and scores of others throughout the nation.
It’s called the franking privilege. All you have to do is get elected to a Federal office once, and then you can kiss those messy stamps and com-plicated postage meters good-bye forever.
The House Commission on Congressional Mailing Standards stipulates that Congressmen can not mail re-election materials at the taxpayer’s expense, but they may mail “informative newsletters,” like the “Energy Report” Mattox sent out last spring.
There were 180,000 copies of the letter sent out last spring, so the bulk rate mailing cost alone would have come to $14,400 if the Congressman had been paying for it. Average total production and mailing cost for such mailers runs about 20 cents apiece, so a private citizen would have had to pay about $36,000 to send out the newsletter.
But if you can conform to these simple guidelines, you can send out thousands of mailers to voters throughout the district:
●Don’t use your picture morethan once per page.
●Don’t use your name morethan eight times per page.
●Don’t refer directly to yourre-election campaign.
