The tactical voting website that began life as a humble spreadsheet has been crowdfunding to raise money to target voters in key marginal seats.
In 2015, three quarters of votes were ‘wasted’, that is, they did not actually contribute to electing an MP.
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With just one day to go before General Election polls open, a progressive campaign called Unite Against The Tories has raised over £1,000 to pay for ads on Facebook to encourage vote swapping.
Vote swapping is when a voter in one constituency agrees to vote tactically for a candidate or party who wouldn’t have been their first choice but has a greater chance of winning in that area.
The appeal reads:
Tactical2017 is a progressive grassroots campaign. We’re encouraging the British electorate to unite and vote tactically in the 2017 election to keep the Tories out of government.
Without any funding, our site has already been shared hundreds of thousands of times, and received national media attention.
But we still need to do more in these final days to get our message across to voters in the 50-100 key seats that will decide the election.
Unless you’re a Tory voter of course. Or Ukip for that matter.
Becky Snowden, 28, created the original online document which shows how voters can attempt to defeat what was then an odds-on Conservative victory in June.
Since then the polls have narrowed drastically with the latest showing the Tories’ lead over Labour has shrunk from 17% to just 1% in a month.
The proportion of people saying the Labour leader would make a better prime minister than Theresa May went from 21% to 36% in a month, the Survation poll for Good Morning Britain (GMB) found.
Snowden told HuffPost UK in April: “I know that there are a lot of people out there who don’t want another Tory government. But due to our broken voting system, they only need 36% of the vote to get a majority of seats (this is exactly what happened in 2015).
“So the only way to prevent the Tories from getting another majority is to vote tactically. And that’s why I made the sheet, so that people would have a resource to find out which constituencies should vote which way.”