UK European Elections 2019 - What effect will tactical voting have?

This simulator is aimed at voters who want to use the EU elections to show their support for Leave or Remain

It is based purely on Leave vs Remain and does not look at the many other important aspects of parties such as policies, ideologie, reputation etc

For people not trying to vote tactically around Leave/Remain statement, just vote for your favourite party who you think will best represent your region in the EU

For people wanting to show their support for Leave, tactically Brexit Party is the obvious choice

For people wanting to show their support for Remain, the tactical choice is not obvious. With First-Past-The-Post elections, tactically you would simply vote for whoever you believe will be ahead. But with Party List voting using DHondt its more complicated

The following simulator looks at how the choice of tactical party and the amount of tactical voting affects the outcome of the tactical vote

Simulation Parameters

Choose a Poll to base predictions on

Choose your Region

Enter the percentage of Remain Party supporters who will vote tactically (Be realistic)

Choose a Remain Party to simulate tactically voting for that party

Simulation Results based on given Tactical Vote Percentage

Tactical Vote Effect on Remain Seats

Conclusions, Limitations, False Assumptions

  • What you will notice is that as the Tactical Vote Percentage goes from 0 to 100, the number of remain seats goes up and down. This means that sometimes TOO MUCH tactical voting can be detrimental to the cause, unless SO MANY PEOPLE tactically vote that it goes over a 2nd Seat threshold which is probably unrealistic.

  • The Leave/Remain/Neither grouping is fairly simplistic. "Leave Parties" here are UKIP and BrexitParty. "Remain Parties" are LibDem, SNP, PlaidCymru, Green and ChangeUK. "Neither"/"On the Fence" parties are everyone else.

  • The percentage of tactical vote participation does not take into account the people who were already being tactical when responding to the YouGov survey

  • The YouGov survey gave the results with regions grouped together e.g. North, as opposed to the more granular election regions i.e. "North East England", "North West England", "Yorkshire and the Humber" etc.

Data Sources

About

  • This is not intended to help people decide how to vote and whether to vote tactically or not. It's just done out of curiosity.

  • SUGGESTIONS/IMPROVEMENTS/CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME All code can be found here. So you can make contributions yourself using GitHub.