It’s as predictable as rain in July and snow in January and the amount can seem equally as heavy.

I’m talking about election-related letters that I receive after the published deadline.

In the case of Tuesday’s primary election, we set a deadline for 5 p.m. Friday, July 23 to receive any letters of endorsement related to the primary election. We ran an information item on the Opinion Page every day for almost a week before deadline and we regularly ran the notice two or three times a week before that.

Readers should have seen it yet invariably, we always receive a number of letters after the deadline and they are usually accompanied by some consternation from the writers as to why they can’t still be published.

I try to explain the policy — sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not.
As I’ve said before but it bares repeating, experience has taught us not to run letters closer than about a week before an election. We do this to be reasonable, fair and out of a sense of practicality.

The Oakland Press used to run letters even on the day of the election. But we found that people were waiting to submit their letters until just before election day hoping for publication on that day. The general theory was that the last letter read by people before voting would influence their selections. This created a flood of letters that logically were impossible to deal with because we just didn’t have the space to run them all.

So, by establishing deadlines, we allow our readers to express their opinions and get them published. It seems to be the fairest way to handle election-related letters.
Admittedly, particularly this year, we’ve had to bend our rule on running letters a week before the election.

Because of the last minute flood of correspondence, we ran election related letters through Thursday, although we had hoped to run them all by Tuesday. Logically, because of space limitations, we couldn’t do it. All the letters were received by the deadline but we missed our publication deadline. Was it fair to run the letters within a week of the election? We think it was but let me know how you feel.

In the meantime, remember that this Tuesday is just the first half of the election year. The general election on Nov. 2 is looming, set up by the results of Tuesday’s primary.

So, we’ll have a new deadline for election-related letters. Probably around Oct. 20 but that isn’t set yet, although readers will be fully informed after the primary. However, there is one condition. People must read the Opinion Page to see the notice. We haven’t figured out a better way of informing the public about our letter policy other than through notices on the Opinion Page. We can publish the notices but we can’t make people read them. However, I hope you do.

And, unless you’ve cast an absentee ballot, be sure to vote Tuesday.