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18
Jul
‘Scrap tactical voting’, says North Yorkshire voting reform group
Voting reform pressure group Compass York and North Yorkshire has called for an end to tactical voting.
Compass York and North Yorkshire is part of the national Compass campaign for a fairer voting system.
It urged voters to vote tactically in the general election to support candidates in favour of proportional representation.
But it now says that approach damaged the Green Party and should be scrapped.
Green candidate Shan Oakes did not actively campaign in Harrogate and Knaresborough and lost her deposit with just 3.4% of the vote.
Instead she and other party members focused on getting Arnold Warneken elected in neighbouring Wetherby and Easingwold, which includes Boroughbridge. But Mr Warneken polled just 8.7% to finish fourth.
Compass York and North Yorkshire said in a statement this week a national YouGov poll on July 1, which said 30% would like to vote for the Greens but would instead vote tactically for another party, reflected the struggle the Greens had locally to mobilise support.
By contrast, it said hardly any voters in Wetherby and Easingwold voted tactically in support of the Greens. The statement said:
It is, then, the Green Party that is most damaged by this strategy, losing more than half of its voters to other parties for tactical reasons and attracting almost no tactical voters from those parties, as appears to have occurred in Wetherby and Easingwold.
The statement said the Greens’ seven per cent vote nationally would have resulted in 45 MPs under proportional representation rather than the four they got under the first past the post system. It added:
This shows that tactical voting, however magnanimous, is not the strategy needed to address the electoral unfairness that sees smaller parties like the Greens lose not only parliamentary seats, but also their election deposits.
For this reason, Compass York and North Yorkshire will continue the wider campaign to address the electoral unfairness of first past the post and to change the electoral system for good, so no one will ever have to vote tactically again.
It added the group would continue to be build grassroots support “that will be essential in the fight for a fairer electoral system” in North Yorkshire. It added:
One where the proportion of the total votes cast for each party matches the seats gained. We say no more tactical voting. We need PR.
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