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It could be the dead wot won it

simon gray 2017-06-08, 09:02:15
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According to the polls - varying widely between an increased majority for the Conservatives down to a hung parliament, with one little-reported poll (done by an ad agency rather than a traditional polling organisation, but with a track record of getting its guesses right) even showing a Labour win, the election is too close to call. The fact of there being such a wide variation in the predictions in the final polls from each organisation is evidence enough it's too close to call, even with some polls predicting a big Conservative win. 

So of course people are hanging their hopes on the poll which shows the result they'd rather see, and hanging their hopes on the demographic which is mostly likely to vote for the result they'd rather see. 'The old could win it', Conservative supporters say, 'The young could win it', Labour supporters say. 

With it this close to call, there's one demographic nobody has thought of who could win it. The dead. 

Eh?

In the olden days it was a pretty tricky process to get a postal vote - you had to satisfy your local elections office, and even prove so, that it would be physically impossible for you to get to the polling station on Election Day. More recently in an effort to boost turnout the requirements were dropped, and postal voting was made available on demand to anybody who asks for it. 

So it's feasibly possible that there are people who applied for postal votes, sent them in, and died before Election Day - whether they were expecting a possibility of dying or whether their death came completely unexpected. 

If the election really is going to be as close as some polls are having it, if there are a few key marginals which turn on just a handful of votes - and in local elections there have often been whole councils which turn on the toss of a coin because the votes are a dead heat - it's not impossible some of those votes could have been cast by dead people. 

It could be the dead wot won it.

#politics

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