Federal Act
on Political Rights
(PRA)¹

¹ The Con­fed­er­a­tion shall provide the can­tons with the pro­pos­als to be sub­mit­ted to a pop­u­lar vote and the bal­lot pa­pers.

² Each pro­pos­al shall be ac­com­pan­ied by a short, ob­ject­ive ex­plan­a­tion from the Fed­er­al Coun­cil that shall also take ac­count of the opin­ions of sig­ni­fic­ant minor­it­ies. The pro­pos­al must con­tain the word­ing of the ques­tions on the bal­lot pa­per. In the case of pop­u­lar ini­ti­at­ives and ref­er­en­dums, the ini­ti­at­ive com­mit­tee shall in­form the Fed­er­al Coun­cil of their ar­gu­ments and the Fed­er­al Coun­cil shall take such ar­gu­ments in­to ac­count in its ex­plan­at­ory state­ment. The Fed­er­al Coun­cil may amend or re­ject de­fam­at­ory, blatantly false or ex­cess­ively long state­ments. Ref­er­ences to elec­tron­ic sources may be in­cluded in the ex­plan­at­ory state­ment only if the au­thor of the ref­er­ences de­clares in writ­ing that none of the con­tent of the sources is il­leg­al and that the sources are not linked to elec­tron­ic pub­lic­a­tions with il­leg­al con­tent.²²

³ Per­sons eli­gible to vote shall re­ceive the doc­u­ments re­quired to cast a val­id vote un­der can­ton­al law (bal­lot pa­per, polling card, of­fi­cial vot­ing en­vel­ope, val­id­a­tion stamp²³, etc.) at least three and no more than four weeks pri­or to the polling day. The pro­pos­al sub­mit­ted to a pop­u­lar vote and the ex­plan­at­ory state­ments may be sent at an earli­er date. The Fed­er­al Chan­cellery shall pub­lish the pro­pos­als and the ex­plan­at­ory state­ment elec­tron­ic­ally at least six weeks pri­or to the polling day.^{24 25}

⁴ The can­tons may by law au­thor­ise com­munes to send only one copy of the pro­pos­als and the ex­plan­at­ory state­ments to each house­hold un­less a mem­ber of the house­hold who is eli­gible to vote re­quests that per­son­al cop­ies be sent.²⁶