00:00Why is everyone talking about tactical voting?
00:05Tactical voting.
00:06Tactical voting.
00:07Tactical voting.
00:08It's two words we often hear on the lips of politicians and news presenters during election campaigning.
00:14But what does it actually mean?
00:22Tactical voting is where a voter chooses a political party they would not usually support
00:27in order to prevent another party from winning.
00:30YouGov polling for an Electoral Reform Society report
00:34showed one in three 2019 voters opted for a tactical vote
00:39instead of their preferred party or candidate.
00:43In a June 2024 Ipsos survey,
00:4519% of voters said they would vote tactically at the upcoming general election,
00:51an increase of 5% on 2019.
00:55But why does it exist?
00:58To work this out, we have to look at the voting system used to elect MPs to the House of Commons,
01:03first past the post.
01:05The UK is divided into 650 parliamentary constituencies.
01:11Voters select their preferred candidate,
01:13and the one with the most votes becomes that area's MP.
01:17The party with the most MPs becomes the government,
01:20rather than the party with the most votes overall.
01:23For example, in areas where the votes for Labour and the Liberal Democrats
01:27outweigh those for the Conservative candidate,
01:29but neither beats them alone, the Tory candidate wins.
01:33Therefore, many votes are considered wasted.
01:38This voting method means just one vote can decide the winning candidate,
01:42and the overall winning party is usually elected by less than 50% of voters.
01:47In 2019, the Conservatives only won 43.6% of the vote.
01:53But it's not the only method available.
01:56This government will replace the House of Lords with an elected second chamber,
02:01where members are elected by a proportional voting system.
02:05We're going to be having a referendum in May on should we change our voting system.
02:09I don't think we should.
02:10The public were offered the chance to switch to the alternative vote in 2011.
02:16Under this system, voters put a number by each candidate.
02:20For example, one for their first choice, two for their second,
02:23and they may write as many or as few numbers as they wish.
02:27An MP is elected if more than half of the voters put down the same favourite candidate.
02:33If no candidate receives more than half,
02:35whoever comes last is eliminated and their votes are reallocated
02:39according to the next highest preference expressed on each ballot paper.
02:44If a voter has not marked a preference for any candidate that remains in the contest,
02:48then the ballot paper is set aside from the count.
02:53There is less worry for voters that they'll be wasting their vote
02:56and lessens the appeal of tactical voting.
03:00But 67.9% of voters opposed changing the electoral system to the alternative vote.
03:06So we still have first-past-the-post in place, and tactical voting is still at play.
03:14But how does tactical voting work in practice?
03:17Usually with tactical voting, a voter is trying to prevent someone from winning a seat
03:22and so needs to work out who to vote for to get that result.
03:26There are a range of tools online to help voters figure out
03:29who to vote for in their constituency to do this.
03:33Another method is vote swapping,
03:35where someone agrees to vote for a particular party on someone else's behalf
03:39because they know the party they want to vote for in their seat is not likely to win.
03:44So if you're a kind of really staunch Labour voter
03:48and you hate the Conservative Party with every fibre of your being
03:51but you live in the South East somewhere where they might not have any chance of winning,
03:55then in that case, if you're one of those people,
03:57it probably does make sense to vote for, say, the Dems instead
04:01because you might have a chance of denying your opponent a seat.
04:08You might think, well, the Lib Dems, they're OK, they're not going to form a government,
04:12might deny the Tories a bit of power.
04:17So tactical voting is not a new phenomenon.
04:20But have we seen it actually achieve anything in the past?
04:26The term became popular in 1997.
04:29This landslide election saw a group called Get Rid of Them campaign across 90 seats
04:34where the incumbent Conservative government was vulnerable.
04:38More recently, in 2017, an Electoral Reform Society report claimed
04:43that 6.5 million people made tactical votes in the election.
04:4920% said they planned to choose an MP who was most likely to beat the one they disliked.
04:55It did generate a lot of attention, but its effectiveness has been hotly debated ever since.
05:00What it did do was bring tactical voting to mainstream attention.
05:05One of the big examples from the recent parliament
05:09would be the Chesham and Amersham by-election in 2021.
05:14The Labour Party in 2019 were third place with about 13% of the vote.
05:19And that vote disappeared completely.
05:22It went down to below 2% and the assumption is most of it went to the Lib Dems.
05:26The Lib Dems then won that seat.
05:28So on the one hand, you think, well, that was a real success for tactical voting.
05:31But on the other hand, the Lib Dems won that seat by a margin greater
05:35than the Labour vote share that could have potentially moved to them.
05:40So it's hard to say for sure that tactical voting was critical,
05:44but it's an example where it has happened recently and has been seen to be a success.
05:49What effect could tactical voting have in the 2024 election?
05:54According to new analysis by The Independent,
05:57more than 100 seats could be primed for tactical voting in 2024.
06:03But this would rely on voters actually understanding what tactical voting is.
06:09One 2023 study showed 52% of voters could correctly identify
06:14the winning party in their constituency.
06:16Only 19% could identify who came second.
06:20I think there's much more potential for Liberal Democrat Labour tactical voting
06:27simply because the Liberal Democrats are the second place party
06:32in a substantial number of seats, which means that Labour voters
06:36might shift to the Liberal Democrats and vice versa.
06:40Now, the situation for more right wing tactical voting
06:45is a little bit more problematic.
06:47There aren't seats where reform are obviously the main competitor,
06:51so it doesn't make much sense for Conservative supporters
06:54to tactically vote for reform.
06:58Tactical voting's effectiveness still isn't proven,
07:01with a greater awareness from the electorate on their voting choices being required.
07:06But with First Past the Post, the method with which we choose our politicians,
07:10tactical voting can be a useful tool in getting the representation you want.
07:17Use the little wall ahead so they can sit as they drive through or walk up.
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