On 5 June 2005 the Swiss will vote on whether to become part of the Schengen area, which is a group of European countries that permits travel between those countries without presenting a passport.

The committee against the measure (www.schengen-nein.ch) is distributing flyers with sketches of a screaming man and woman, apparently scared out of their wits, along with the text: "Lose our security? Lose our jobs? NO to Schengen!" But thanks to those sketches, you don't need to understand German, French or Italian to figure out what the committee is up to.

This is a prime example of Today's Campaigning Tip: Fear works better than reason. If you want to promote a cause that is in the interest of a special interest group but not the majority of the population, and therefore you can't win using rational arguments, use scare tactics instead.

When democracy is working properly, each well-informed voter is able to weigh the pros and cons of an issue and make a decision based on his or her value system. It may be that in today's fast-paced world of short attention spans it is necessary to summarize the issue's most important aspects and leave out the details. But there is no justification for using scare tactics; doing so is essentially an admission by the campaigners that they would lose if voters were well informed.

Thanks to fear-mongering flyers such as this one, a vote on the Schengen issue based on rational debate, from which every Swiss voter would benefit, will be that much more difficult to achieve.