DEBATE: Could tactical voting actually make a difference to the result of this election?

Could tactical voting actually make a difference to the result of this election?

Joe Twyman, co-founder and director of Deltapoll and a presenter of the Polling Politics Podcast, says YES.

In first past the post elections, the difference between winning and losing a majority can be small. Really small.

Back in 2017, the difference between Theresa May’s Conservatives winning a workable majority and the hung parliament that we ended up with was just 75 votes.

If 11 Labour voters in Kensington, 12 Labour voters in Dudley North, 16 Labour voters in Newcastle-Under-Lyme, 25 Labour voters in Crewe and Nantwich, and 11 SNP voters in Perth and North Perthshire had all switched to vote Conservative, that would have meant five more Tory seats.

In the end there were 31 seats where the margin of victory was fewer than 500 votes.

In many seats, tactical voting will not make the slightest bit of difference — 192 seats, for example, have not changed hands since 1945.
But in a small number of seats tactical voting could make a small difference in the vote — and even a small difference could have a huge impact.

Lauren McEvatt, managing director at Morpeth Consulting and a former Wales Office special adviser, says NO.

I realise there’s every possibility that, by tomorrow, I’ll look like a complete idiot. But I firmly believe that tactical voting won’t make an overwhelming difference to the election result tonight, however many vote-swapping websites and last-ditch pleas from Remain candidates there are.

Most people going to the polls today will rationalise that the choice is between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. They may not like either of them much, but in the end they will vote for one of the two main parties accordingly. The smaller parties will be squeezed out in the final result, as they almost always are in the UK.

The electoral agreement between the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, and Plaid Cymru bears this out. The formal pact was an admission that merely asking people to vote tactically or lend their votes just doesn’t move the dial.

Of course, we could wake up tomorrow to Prime Minister Jo Swinson, and a petrified British squirrel population. But I suspect not.

Main image credit: Getty