{"id":774,"date":"2020-01-09T14:32:39","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T14:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voteforpolicies.org.uk\/?p=774"},"modified":"2023-06-20T10:08:52","modified_gmt":"2023-06-20T10:08:52","slug":"2019-wrap-up-good-result-for-vfp-bad-result-for-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforpolicies.org.uk\/blog\/2019-wrap-up-good-result-for-vfp-bad-result-for-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"2019 wrap-up: Good result for VfP, bad result for democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
Looking back at the 2019 general election, how did it go from the perspective of an organisation committed to improving participation in elections?<\/p>\n
One of the more surprising outcomes was that the Vote for Policies survey was taken 1.1 million times in the 12 days it was live. This is more than any other election since we have been running, and we saw traffic levels beyond anything I have previously been involved in (for fellow geeks: 13,000 concurrent users at peak, with 12 servers running to manage the load)<\/em>. <\/p>\n Overall that was a great sign that Vote for Policies continues to offer a valuable service to many people. And if Vote for Policies does help people feel informed and therefore more likely to vote (and independent research in 2015<\/a> found that it does), the question is how can we reach more people, and have a bigger impact on voter turnout?<\/p>\n Let’s come back to this question, and turn now to the wider context of democratic participation.<\/p>\n Now let’s consider how well the election went from a democracy point of view. Based on combined data<\/a> from the BBC and the Electoral Commission, there are 56.0 million eligible voters in the UK, 47.6 million of which are registered to vote (which is the figure used for ‘turnout’). In this context, the figure of 1.1 million Vote for Policies users equates to 2.3% of the turnout, and just under 2% of the total electorate (all those eligible to vote). So while we celebrate more people using Vote for Policies than ever before, we need to be realistic about the kind of reach – and therefore impact – we are achieving. <\/p>\n In fact, if you look at the graphs below, it’s hard to see how the 2019 general election was anything but another bombshell for our democratic system – yet more proof that very few people see value in voting. <\/p>\n\n\nTurnout and eligible voters<\/h3>\n