Political

5 things campaigners do on polling day

A yellow fronted home
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay.

Well, people vote… and campaigners also campaign. If you’re not used to political campaigning, what happens on polling day (and indeed the very fact that it’s a super-busy day rather than the quiet day it usually is in the political news coverage) can be a bit of a mystery.

Can you campaign on polling day?

Yes, campaigning is allowed just as on any other day.

There is no special ban on canvassing or leafleting, for example, though you need to not get in the way of people trying to get into a polling station.

Watch out for not publicising how individuals have voted or taking selfies inside a polling station, however.

What campaigning do people do?

Here then is my list of the five main things campaigners get up to on polling day:

1. Delivering campaign literature
Even on polling day, people are still making up their minds for sure how to vote – and those who think they have made up their minds might yet change them. Which is why the leaflets, letters and digital messages carry on going out.

2. Knocking-up
Political knocking-up means calling on voters to remind them it is polling day and to give them a final personal push both to vote and to vote for us. To make best use of the time spent on this, the people called on are usually a mix of people planning to vote for us – for whom a personal visit helps ensure they actually go to vote and stick with their plan to support us – and also supporters of parties who aren’t in with a chance of winning but whose supporters might tactically switch to us. Sometimes other groups may be added in, such as if people who signed a local petition overwhelmingly are backing us and so it makes sense also to knock-up those who signed the petition who we don’t have canvass data for.

Lib Dem tip #8: don't let fear of policy details put you off canvassing

Often people who have never gone door-to-door canvassing worry, understandably, that they might get asked all sorts of different policy questions which they are not sure about. more

This is why when knocking-up you shouldn’t be too surprised if you find a few people not voting for us. That’s normal.

The list of names we’re calling on is called, in Liberal Democrat circles, the shuttleworth (after the printing firm that produced the carbon copy paper used for these lists back in pre-computer days).

Knocking-up can also be done over the phone – which is great for getting through geographically dispersed people quickly but is limited by how many people we have usable phone numbers for.

Either way, knocking-up is much more efficient if done using the MiniVAN app (which also keeps data much more secure than using pieces of paper).

3. Telling
One way of making the knocking-up more effective is to know who has already voted and to exclude them from the lists of people being called on.

Hence telling – party campaigners stationed at polling stations, making a note of who has gone to vote (where people are happy to reveal who they are – most people are). The data from tellers reduces the size of the shuttleworth, making more effective the efforts of people to doorstep or phone people on it.

There’s also a strong likelihood – never properly measured – that having a teller with a rosette on at the polling station helps reinforce the message that the party is active and worth thinking about voting for. Having Lib Dem tellers where there has never been a serious Lib Dem campaign before, for example, could have an impact.

Even so, having a full cover of tellers isn’t the objective for polling day. Rather, it’s to do as good a job as possible of reminding those on the shuttleworth to vote and to vote Lib Dem. Telling is a means to the end.

It is also one of the few areas of campaigning where what is seen as acceptable locally can vary massively from place to place. Things like can you ask voters who they are on the way into the polling station or whether you have to wait until they leave depend on local custom and Returning Officer tradition and so what is obviously okay in one place may not be elsewhere. Make sure you stick closely to what the local Liberal Democrat agent says and refer to them if in doubt.

4. Reminding postal voters to vote
Postal voters can’t vote in person but they can still return their postal ballots to the council or a polling station on polling day. There are strict rules about party supporters not interfering in this process, but it is why postal voters are usually included in the lists of people to call on.

5. Targeting
A combination of data from knocking-up and tellers will often tell those running polling day that a ward is either going to be won comfortably or lost heavily. In either case, that then means it makes sense to switch resources to helping on polling day in a seat which is close.

The extra votes you can win over on polling day are massively more valuable in a target seat where they can make the difference between winning and losing.

At the 2019 general election, 26 seats were won by less than 2%.

If, say, you can put in some extra work to win 10 extra votes, it’s better if those 10 are the difference between losing by 5 and winning by 5 than between winning by 1,010 and winning by 1,020.

Allocating resources to maximise their impact on close wards is a far from perfect mix of art and science. What it is definitely, however, is much better than the alternative of people only campaigning wherever is closest to where they live – that makes for much less efficient use of people’s campaign efforts, a much less efficient operation at securing votes and fewer Lib Dems being elected. Flawed optimisation trumps definite inefficiency.

Hope you have fun!

One response to “5 things campaigners do on polling day”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

All comments and data you submit with them will be handled in line with the privacy and moderation policies.