Voters are being confronted with what has been described as 'grotesque' information in election leaflets, as parties make dubious tactical voting claims ahead of the May local elections. An exclusive investigation by Full Fact for the Guardian has uncovered that campaign materials are relying on national polling data, 'dodgy' bar charts, and doorstep surveys to support assertions about which parties can win.
Misleading Claims Across Party Lines
Leaflets distributed by local politicians across England are claiming that only their party can win, or that another party 'can't win here,' despite a lack of reliable evidence, according to Full Fact. The organisation analysed 331 leaflets uploaded to Democracy Club's online archive in the first two weeks of April. Fifty-nine contained a chart or graphic, with 14 of these deemed unsourced, misleading, or failing to provide reliable evidence about voting intention.
Examples from all major parties were identified. A Labour leaflet in Ealing Common, west London, warned voters not to 'let Reform sneak in here' and included a bar chart stating 'Greens can't win here,' with an arrow pointing to the green bar labelled 'Wasted vote!' The chart used the 2024 London assembly result for a much larger area and added an extra bar reflecting Reform national polling, creating a 'misleading and confusing' picture, Full Fact said.
Peter Kellner, former chair of YouGov, described such claims as 'grotesque' and noted that spurious data-backed assertions are becoming increasingly common. 'Because there are far more parties, and it is far less clear who you should vote for if you want to vote tactically, all parties are putting a lot of effort into convincing voters that they are the only option,' he said. 'But if commercial companies were making some of these claims, they wouldn't be allowed to get away with it.'
Specific Examples of Misleading Leaflets
A Green party leaflet in Gateshead showed Reform in the lead with the Greens in second, beneath the headline 'Greens are now the only alternative to Reform.' The chart cited YouGov polling from March, but the same pollster currently places the Greens third. Kellner noted that national polls are not reliable indicators of local outcomes.
A Reform leaflet in Chelmsford presented an unsourced bar chart putting Reform on 34% and the Conservatives and Labour on 16%. Full Fact found that while Reform had polled at 34% with at least one pollster, no exact match existed for the Conservative and Labour figures. Moreover, the bar chart was 'completely out of proportion,' with an online calibration tool suggesting that if Reform's bar represented 34%, the Conservative and Labour bars would correspond to about 9%, not 16%.
A Liberal Democrat leaflet in Eastgate and Moreton Hall, Suffolk, stated 'It's Lib Dem or Reform here' while using a bar chart showing the Conservatives in second and the Lib Dems in third. It cited a YouGov quote about the Lib Dems being 'most likely to see off Reform UK,' likely referencing a March 2025 article. The Lib Dem candidate's agent said the image was 'illustrative and not a true graph.'
A Conservative leaflet in Haslemere, west Surrey, told voters 'Reform can't win here,' based on 2024 general election data for the entire county, which Full Fact called 'very unreliable evidence.'
Impact on Democracy
Full Fact's editor, Steve Nowottny, said: 'There's nothing wrong with parties making a case to voters, but too many leaflets are making overblown, dodgy claims with cherrypicked, misleading or unreliable data.' The organisation concluded that some leaflets could mislead people as they choose how to vote, for instance by claiming definitively that another party 'can't win here' or that only one party can stop another.
Kellner added that while 'the mechanics of democracy work reasonably well' in the UK, disinformation peddled by political parties is a 'small part of a larger jigsaw' that has eroded trust in politics, politicians, and institutions over the past two decades. 'If one defines a healthy democracy as one where there is an open, free exchange of views and information which allows voters to make up their minds on the basis of truth rather than lies, then, yes, this is bad for democracy,' he said.
