The Top Line — explanations further down.
- I think there is something to be gained from tactical voting.
- I’m prepared to follow the RemainVoter.com advice on how.
- There are risks involved, but I think they need to be taken.
- If you’d rather play safe, the Best For Britain Vote page will take your post code and show you who is the leading party in your area.
Why a Personal View?
A personal view, because as expressed in my strawman post some weeks ago, how you vote depends on your priorities and I think enough people share some of my priorities that it’s worth writing, but I’m very aware many people have other priorities and I’d like to keep this short by not exploring too many other priority sets.
Why tactical voting?
A more complete discussion can be found in my previous post. The key issue is that the Brexit Party is consolidating a lot of Leaver support into one party, whilst Remainers are split between a number of choices. In a perfectly proportional system this would not matter, but in the UK’s implementation of D’Hondt, it does. The Remain parties have not come to any agreements and so it is incumbent on “we, the voters” to try to make up for this. Making up for this involves choosing our votes, as best as we can, to get MEPs who support our overall aims.
Of course if we could get a big enough turnout, many of these considerations would fade — so every one of us should be having conversations with friends/colleagues/relatives/acquaintances to try and get more people voting. But since high turnout cannot be guaranteed, we have to think tactically as well.
(If you’re wondering about Labour, I talk about that near the end.)
The Risks of Tactical Voting
Many people say that the philosophy should be to “first, do no harm” and that tactical voting contains a grave danger where (e.g.) in trying to push more than one candidate over the threshold, we actually fail to push them both.
This is a real danger. However, we are not in a position to be conservative. The Brexit Party has cornered the Leave vote quite well and will leverage the electoral setup into a victory on seats that the media will spin as having great meaning, even though the vote percentage for the total of the Remain parties will be similar. As such, if we don’t want to listen to weeks of that spin, we have to gamble where we can to claw back some seats out of the system.
RemainVoter.com
Why am I prepared to recommend the RemainVoter.com model to you? It has been developed by a set of Remainers who did not prejudge the party situation, they have followed the polls (and the notable shifts since the local elections) and are very open to questions about how their model works.
A key factor for me is that they are attempting to maximise seats, rather than simply defensively push everyone towards a single party. We know that the number tactical voters is not huge. Many people feel an attachment to a particular party and will vote for them. As such, rather than simply reinforcing those parties who the polls suggest are already on track for some success, the task for us as tactical voters is to put some votes behind the party most likely to snatch one more seat from the opposition. The quirk of the D’Hondt system is that this is sometimes the largest party of “our side” but sometimes it is not.
As a simplified example, if we say that it takes 12% to win a seat in a region and Party X is polling at 14% and Party Y at 10%, it should be clear that to win the second seat with Party X, we would need tactical votes amounting to 10% whereas with Party Y we need only 2% of tactical vote movement.
Thus, it is not simply a case of backing a single party, but accepting that many of those polled for Party Y are not tactical, or they would have shifted already and we as tactical voters need to work with them. RemainVoter.com out of all the tactical sites has taken this on board into their model and as you may see, depending on the region, this leads to some unexpected recommendations. They have also committed to updating their recommendations as new polling info comes in. (Something which was proving beyond the ability of myself as an individual to do.)
Will it Work?
There’s a risk here. We could fall between the stools.
There are no guarantees.
But if we always operate as a movement on the defensive, hamstrung by the ineptness of our politicians, how will things improve? We may wish that there was a single Remain Party to go toe-to-toe with the Brexit Party, but there isn’t. Estimates suggest that 500,000 tactical voters, split across the various regions could make an appreciable impact on the seat count. If you feel you could be one of those people, maybe we have to give it a try, despite the risks.
So, if you’re with me, head to RemainVoter.com and look at their advice for your region.
If you’re not sure what region you are in, or you’d like to look at the most recent large poll and vote based on that, head to the Best For Britain Vote page will take your post code and show you who is the leading party in your area.
The Labour Issue
When I wrote my previous post Labour’s manifesto had not yet been released. So I said at that time I was holding open the idea the it might contain enough of a commitment to (e.g.) a second referendum to rally Remainers to the party. However, this is not how things have gone. Labour’s response to disappointing local election results was to double down on Brexit, saying that “this shows the voters want us to get on with it” and the polling shows that this was a trigger for many Remainers.
I feel we each have to make our own judgement on what Labour’s triangulation says to us. Corbyn came on TV yesterday and implied their stance on a 2nd Referendum had shifted, but within a couple of hours a “senior Labour source” was briefing that we misunderstood and their position remained the same. The signals have been very mixed. As such I support RemainVoter.com’s decision to classify Labour as “uncommitted on Brexit” and to build their model around helping people vote for parties committed to Remain.
That said, if you feel comfortable with Labour’s stance, you should vote for them. There are no regions where Labour is so far behind that the votes will be fully wasted.
