Election leaflets are offering “grotesque” details about find out how to vote tactically in the May elections, utilizing nationwide polling data, “dodgy” bar charts and doorstep surveys to assist claims about events’ possibilities of profitable.
Leaflets distributed by local politicians throughout England are claiming that solely their party can win, or that one other party “can’t win here”, when there isn’t a good proof to indicate that is true, a Full Fact investigation for the Guardian has revealed.
Some of the campaigning materials Full Fact checked out that contained a chart or graphic “failed to provide reliable evidence to back up a specific claim about how people are likely to vote locally, or were unsourced or misleading in some other way”, with examples from all the most important events.
Readers who responded to a Guardian callout shared photographs of leaflets they’d acquired. Some mentioned they’d at first thought a leaflet from the Conservatives was from the Green party, as a result of it was printed in inexperienced with solely a small Conservative brand.
Another expressed doubt about what they described as “very dubious” statistics from the Liberal Democrats exhibiting a party was “the only sensible way to vote”.
The polling and political analyst Peter Kellner, a former chair of YouGov, described a few of the claims and data used in leaflets as “grotesque” and mentioned spurious claims backed up by unreliable data had been changing into more and more frequent.
“Because there are far more parties, and it is far less clear who you should vote for if you want to vote tactically, all parties are putting a lot of effort into convincing voters that they are the only option,” he mentioned. “But if commercial companies were making some of these claims, they wouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”
Full Fact mentioned good data on voting intentions was usually not obtainable in local elections and it was cheap for political events to deal with significant swings in the nationwide polls. But the organisation concluded: “Some of these leaflets could mislead people as they choose how to vote, for instance by claiming definitively that another party ‘can’t win here’ or that only one party can stop another.”
Full Fact’s editor, Steve Nowottny, mentioned: “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 organisation analysed 331 leaflets from throughout England uploaded to Democracy Club’s online archive in the primary two weeks of April. Fifty-nine included a chart or graphic, with 14 of those unsourced or deceptive or failing to offer dependable proof about voting intention.
Among probably the most egregious examples uncovered in the leaflet evaluation was a Labour leaflet distributed in Ealing Common, a ward in west London, that warned voters to not “let Reform sneak in here” and included a bar chart that acknowledged “Greens can’t win here”, with the addition of an arrow pointing to the inexperienced bar on the chart stating: “Wasted vote!” The Lib Dems, who management two of Ealing Common’s three seats, had been the smallest bar.
The chart used the 2024 London meeting consequence for Ealing and Hillingdon, a a lot bigger space. It added an additional bar that seems to replicate Reform nationwide polling, “giving a picture that is misleading and confusing,” in line with Full Fact.
Kellner mentioned: “What they’ve done is grotesque, and they’ve not been candid. The figures are in no sense indicative of Ealing Common.”
Ealing Labour party mentioned the diagram was “clearly an illustration of what could happen in a very competitive election, and can’t be taken literally, as no element of trying to predict the future can be”. It conveyed “the very real and serious point that Reform are attempting to make real gains in Ealing”, and was “a common method of trying to make that point during an election campaign”, it mentioned.
A leaflet from the Green party in Gateshead confirmed Reform in the lead with the Greens in second, beneath a headline that mentioned the “Greens are now the only alternative to Reform”.
The chart acknowledged it was based mostly on opinion ballot data from YouGov in March, however the identical pollster currently puts the Greens third. Regardless, Kellner mentioned a nationwide ballot was not a dependable indicator of local outcomes.
A Reform leaflet from Chelmsford gave no supply for its bar chart that put Farage’s party on 34% and the Conservatives and Labour on 16%. Full Fact mentioned whereas Reform had polled at 34% with at the very least one pollster in the previous, it had not discovered a precise match for the Conservative and Labour figures on the identical time.
The bar chart was additionally “completely out of proportion”, it mentioned. An online calibration tool means that if the Reform bar represented 34%, the peak of the Labour and Conservative bars put them at about 9%, not 16%. “This is obviously misleading about the numbers themselves, whether or not they’re accurate or relevant,” Full Fact mentioned.
A Liberal Democrat leaflet from Eastgate and Moreton Hall in Suffolk acknowledged “It’s Lib Dem or Reform here” whereas utilizing a bar chart exhibiting the Conservatives in second and the Lib Dems in third.
It used a YouGov quote stating the Lib Dems had been “most likely to see off Reform UK”, most likely a reference to a YouGov article from March 2025 that requested voters which party they’d vote for if solely Reform and the Lib Dems had an opportunity of profitable. The Lib Dem candidate’s agent mentioned: “The image is illustrative and not a true graph as such, which we emphasised by not putting in any indices.”
Meanwhile, a leaflet from the Conservatives in Haslemere, a ward in west Surrey, informed voters “Reform can’t win here”, apparently based mostly on data for the whole of Surrey from the 2024 common election, which Full Fact mentioned was “very unreliable evidence”.
Full Fact mentioned the evaluation of leaflets was not supposed to be absolutely consultant of the nationwide image however as a substitute checked out what voters would possibly perceive from the data given and whether or not it included dependable proof.
Kellner mentioned that whereas “the mechanics of democracy work reasonably well” in the UK, disinformation peddled by political events had been a “small part of a larger jigsaw” that had led to belief in politics, politicians and establishments being extra broadly eroded in the previous 20 years.
“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 mentioned.
