ElectionLeaflets.org

You don’t have to go very far down the list of uploaded leaflets to find something notable.

I wish people were happy with putting their names and emails in public on a website so I could thank the guy (or gal) in Malvern who uploaded this leaflet with the comment:

The graph showing the last results in West Worcs is the wrong way around – actually the Conservatives got 45% and the Lib Dems 39%.

with added tags “misrepresentation” and “fraud”.

What a hero.

He (or she) is correct — according to Wikipedia and other less well-presented sources such as The Guardian.

My only quibble is they’ve uploaded only one side of the leaflet, so I can’t allege that this is similar to the case of voters being urged to vote tactically in the proportional representation Euro election as though it were a first-past-the-post Parliamentary election. But the timing is suspicious.

To be fair, the picture is captioned:

Liz Lynne campaigning with Richard Burt

Liz Lynne, whose website is here, is an MEP standing for re-election in 3 days time for the West Midlands region, while Richard Burt, whose websites are here and here (with the 2005 election bar chart the right way round), is the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate for West Worcestershire.

You could argue that the inclusion of both of them makes the leaflet ambiguous, but it doesn’t really work like that. The idea that you’re distributing leaflets that helpfully tells people how to make their votes count in an election expected to be in 2010 just three days before an election in 2009 where such information does not apply is silly. Someone needs to call them out on this.

The actual result in the last EU elections in 2004 put the LibDems at 13.7% behind UKIP at 17.5%, which meant that Liz Lynne got allocated the 7th and last seat.

This year, according to the changes, the West Midlands is allocated only 6 seats. This means that she has to beat UKIP in terms of percentage, or she’s toast. Labour in fact got 23.4% in the 2004 European election and won 2 seats.

I don’t have time to crunch the numbers regarding the D’Hondt method of seat allocation to determin whether it’s a sane tactic to go after Labour votes and pretend that UKIP doesn’t exist (unless it says something on the other side of the leaflet), because it’s complicated.

Here is a short anti-BNP video which explains how the seat allocation happens. According to Peter Cranie (the Green MEP candidate mentioned) whom I saw on his battle bus today (I am a Green Party member, I have to declare), it’s probably out of date due to a late UKIP surge in the polls.

It’s a good video all the same.

No one really knows what’s going to happen and what tactics to use. Not enough people are used to playing this game enough times.

Probably the best advice is to vote for the party you want to get elected.

Which is how it should be.