Referendums are a turnout war
Referendums are wars fought with press teams and messaging, but the final battlefield is polling day and you have to be registered if you want to win !
Other blog posts on this site have laid out the various sides of the EU debate and why you should vote one way or another. But I wanted to write to simply tell you how these things work and WHY you should vote.
As students you can register in two places: your term time and your home address. This means you can vote wherever you happen to be on polling day. If you are going to be travelling, you can even register for a postal vote .
As a side note, and in one of those ‘it could only happen in a university community’ ways, an 80 year old acquaintance in my University spinning class has applied for a postal vote because he is going to Glastonbury. He assured me that applying online was easy.
Now to the WHY…
It’s easy to think that politics is all about the ‘air-war’. That is the big attention grabbing press stunts leading to news coverage.
However, in any normal election the real work is done in what is called the ‘ground campaign’. This comprises three main elements:
- Leaflet and letter delivery,
- Canvassing (knocking on doors, asking how you might vote)
- Then the big one … polling day
Many people do not realize that the whole point of canvassing voters is not to convince people how to vote, but rather to work up a list of who is voting for whom. Once you have this list, getting ‘your’ voters out of their homes and to the polls on polling day is a key part of any campaign. This is commonly referred to as GOTV “Get out the Vote”.
Polling day is the pinnacle of any serious campaign. Your forces have to be marshalled, your materials readied and a plan of attack made. On polling day all teams will take to the field in a full-on frontal assault on the voters. Those who can get the most of ‘their’ voters to the polls will win the day.
Get Out The Vote or GOTV takes various forms, from the traditional knocking on doors and phoning, to the more regrettable speaker cars advertising polling day like a half-price sale. Political parties are DESPERATE to get their voters to the polling station and secure the result they want. In the past, I myself have convinced a heavily pregnant voter to allow me to drive her to the polls 10 minutes before they close … in her pyjamas.
It’s crushing when your supporters don’t turn out to vote. Having worked your team of volunteers to exhaustion delivering leaflet after leaflet, controlling a message and convincing people your candidate is the one; just to have your supporters stay at home, because “it was a bit rainy”, or they were “a bit tired” or … and this is the very worst, “they forgot”.
I was once packing up an MP’s office, after they had lost their seat, when a local constituent wandered into the office looking to get some help with an issue. During the conversation it became apparent they had not gone to the polls because they didn’t think their vote would matter. I struggled to remain calm.
It does matter. I have seen counts so close they are decided by literally a handful of votes. And in a referendum such as this, there are no foibles in the voting system; no safe seats. Every vote to stay will weigh against every vote to leave. There is just no excuse for not voting.
Let’s go back to our metaphorical battlefield for a moment. The war rooms of the various parties involved are not in control of the referendum and so cannot win by just mobilizing their people as they normally would. The Labour and Conservative parties probably know who supports them in around 65% of the Westminster seats. Or rather they have found enough to win the seat on polling day. But what does that mean on Europe? Being a Labour or Conservative voter does not tell us what you think about membership of the EU. Even the Europhile Lib Dems and the avowed anti-federalists in UKIP will struggle. Their supporter lists split between those who believe in their vision of the future, and the numerous people who just vote for them for local issues or as a protest vote.
So, all the historic party intelligence is rendered temporarily useless. Add to this the fact that everyone’s ground troops are exhausted from the previous campaign that has just finished and we begin to see why the election commanders will struggle to control the field.
This lack of control leaves them with few options. Uneasy alliances are brokered and various parties' ‘big guns’ and frankly, tired old war horses, wander out into no mans land like so many comedy odd couples to try to convince people en masse through the media.
This time we are all in the trenches and will have to make our decision ourselves. The parties, so used to being largely in control of elections, are at the mercy of individual voters.
That would be you.
To be part of this decision, which will affect your generation more than any other, you have to register and you have to vote .
Whatever happens, wherever you are, and whatever you decide, make sure you register, do it today!
Jonathan Walsh
Jon graduated from Southampton in 2003 and served for 2 years as a Vice President of the Students’ Union. He went on to work as a local organizer and National Campaigns Officer in party politics and worked on campaigns from Southampton to Aberdeen. He has agented in and run campaigns for every major type of election from parishes, counties and unitary authorities and from Westminster seats to mayoral races.
Before returning to the University of Southampton to work, Jonathan was the London Campaign Manager in the AV referendum, campaigning to change the voting system, and helped secure more boroughs for the YES campaign in London than was achieved across the rest of the UK. He is currently Vice- Chair of the Electoral Reform Society.
