Political buying (LUR)

LUR is the lowest unit rate. By federal law, in the windows before an election (45 days before a primary or runoff, 60 before a general or special election), a station must offer a legally qualified candidate the lowest rate it charges any other advertiser for the same class and amount of time in the same period. On Switchboard, political is an advertiser class, not a separate product. Setting it changes which rates apply and which validations run; everything else about the order lifecycle is unchanged. It rides in buyer_metadata on the normal order create:

"buyer_metadata": {
  "advertiser_class": "political_candidate_lur",
  "candidate": "...", "office": "...",
  "certification_ref": "doc_88a1"
}

The certification_ref names the NAB or PB-18 style certification forms already on file with the seller.

• Rates: political_candidate_lur orders validate against the seller's lur rate class inside statutory windows (45 days before a primary, 60 before a general); the platform enforces the window as a validation, and a stale card is still a STALE_RATE_CARD, never a mystery.
• Issue advertising is priced at the seller's political-issue card under the political_issue advertiser class and is not LUR-governed; the class exists so nothing is mislabeled.
• Compliance stays where it belongs: station-level public-file obligations remain the seller's; the platform carries certification references and produces an audit trail that makes the political file easy to assemble.
• Preemptibility matters: LUR pricing typically maps to preemptible classes; buying a fixed, non-preemptible schedule at LUR is exactly the conversation the rate card is structured to make explicit.