Election Leaflets Under Fire for Misleading Tactical Voting Claims
Voters in English local elections are being bombarded with leaflets that contain what experts describe as 'grotesque' and 'dodgy' data to influence tactical voting decisions. An investigation by Full Fact, shared exclusively with the Guardian, reveals that many campaign materials rely on national polling, unsourced bar charts, and questionable surveys to assert that only one party can win or that another 'can't win here.'
The analysis examined leaflets from all major parties distributed across England ahead of the May local polls. Of the 331 leaflets uploaded to Democracy Club's online archive in the first two weeks of April, 59 included a chart or graphic. Among those, 14 were unsourced, misleading, or failed to provide reliable evidence about local voting intentions.
Peter Kellner, a former chair of YouGov and a polling and political analyst, described some claims as 'grotesque.' He noted that spurious data is becoming increasingly common as parties compete in a fragmented political landscape. 'If commercial companies were making some of these claims, they wouldn't be allowed to get away with it,' he said.
Questionable Data and Misleading Graphics
One notable example is a Labour leaflet in Ealing Common, west London, which warned voters not to 'let Reform sneak in here.' It featured a bar chart claiming 'Greens can't win here' with an arrow pointing to the green bar labeled 'Wasted vote!' The chart used the 2024 London assembly result for the much larger Ealing and Hillingdon area and added an extra bar reflecting Reform's national polling. Full Fact called this 'misleading and confusing.'
Ealing Labour party defended the leaflet, stating the diagram was 'clearly an illustration of what could happen in a very competitive election' and cannot be taken literally. They maintained it conveyed a 'very real and serious point' about Reform's ambitions in Ealing.
A Green party leaflet in Gateshead showed Reform leading with the Greens in second, under the headline 'Greens are now the only alternative to Reform.' The chart cited a YouGov poll from March, but the same pollster currently places the Greens third. Kellner emphasized that national polls are unreliable indicators of local outcomes.
Reform UK distributed a leaflet in Chelmsford with an unsourced bar chart showing the party at 34% and the Conservatives and Labour at 16%. Full Fact found no exact match for these figures in any poll. Moreover, the bar chart was 'completely out of proportion'—an online calibration tool suggested the Labour and Conservative bars actually represented about 9%, not 16%, making the graphic misleading.
A Liberal Democrat leaflet in Eastgate and Moreton Hall, Suffolk, claimed 'It's Lib Dem or Reform here' despite a bar chart showing the Conservatives in second and the Lib Dems in third. It quoted YouGov stating the Lib Dems were 'most likely to see off Reform UK,' likely referencing a hypothetical scenario. The Lib Dem candidate's agent said the image was 'illustrative and not a true graph,' emphasizing the lack of indices.
In Haslemere, west Surrey, a Conservative leaflet told voters 'Reform can't win here,' based on data from the 2024 general election for the entire county. Full Fact deemed this 'very unreliable evidence.'
Implications for Democracy
Steve Nowottny, editor of Full Fact, said: 'There's nothing wrong with parties making a case to voters, but too many leaflets are making overblown, dodgy claims with cherrypicked, misleading or unreliable data.' The organization stressed that good local voting intention data is often unavailable, and while referencing national swings is reasonable, some leaflets could mislead people by making definitive claims about local outcomes.
Kellner warned that such disinformation is part of a broader erosion of trust in politics and institutions over the past two decades. 'If one defines a healthy democracy as one where there is an open, free exchange of views and information which allows voters to make up their minds on the basis of truth rather than lies, then, yes, this is bad for democracy,' he concluded.
