Counting on Confusion

Graph crimes: Reform spokesperson’s open admission that they are manipulating statistics to boost their visibility.

Take a closer look at that election bar chart. Photo by Monstera Production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cutout-paper-illustration-of-human-hand-with-magnifier-and-chart-5841845/

Last week, a colleague of mine sent me a picture of a leaflet from his local Reform Party that had been posted through his door. The prominently positioned bar chart (have a look at the image below) made the popularity of Lib Dems (yellow) and Reform (turquoise) appear almost neck‑and‑neck, while Conservatives (dark blue) seemed to be lagging a long way behind. The headline of that section of the leaflet was “Only Reform can challenge the Lib Dems here”.

Despite the fact that the leaflet went out across numerous different wards in Bournemouth, the results that were purportedly graphed were actually from a by-election in a single ward in the Bournemouth area: The Talbot & Branksome Woods by-election last September. The results from this ward have, at best, tenuous relevance to the other wards. Presenting a local snapshot as if it were a universal trend is a classic election material fiddle. But this isn’t the leaflet’s worst statistical crime.

The offending “bar chart” from the leaflet.

If you follow the link to the results you can see that the Liberal Democrats won with 910 votes (32.4%). Reform UK came second on 791 (28.2%), with the Conservatives just 21 votes behind on 770 (27.4%). That’s a 4.2 percentage point gap between the Lib Dems and Reform, and a mere 0.8 percentage points between Reform and the Conservatives.

So why do the bars on the chart appear to show Reform so close to the Liberal Democrats while the Conservatives are so far behind. An innocent mistake? Unlikely. We’ve seen numerous examples of party political election material featuring a number of graph crimes, from truncated y-axes to tilted bar charts and even vibes-based bar charts that are more or less made up.

These are textbook misuses of a bar chart. Bar charts typically encode magnitude through length, so when you compress the scale or subtly change the baseline, you can exaggerate differences you like and shrink those you don’t. Tilting the bars on the chart can accentuate or diminish the perceived differences between parties’ popularity. And if you can’t fiddle the charts using the actual numbers then just guessing at what the figures should be is a popular option.

When challenged, a local Reform representative who was involved in creating the leaflet, didn’t apologise or plead mathematical incompetence; he explained that the misleading bar chart was a deliberate tactic. “…it’s done for exactly this reason - to get people (mainly conservatives) sharing and complaining about it - as that way the conversation is about ‘how much Reform beat them by’ rather than who is polling higher. Having them share that very same image on their social media is doing our work for us.”*

For me there is something qualitatively different about this. I found the frank admission that the graphic was engineered to provoke outrage‑amplification - a deliberate ploy for attention relying on opponents spreading their misleading message for them – quite shocking. Rather than correct, retract or apologise, the response to being caught out was to celebrate the deception as a strategy.

If I were a voter in the area I would certainly think hard about voting for a party that is so gratuitous in its celebration of the seemingly deliberate deceit of the electorate. I would also question its opinion of my intelligence as a voter if it thought that such an obvious manipulation would be enough to win my vote.

Local statistician and recipient of the leaflet Barney Maunder-Taylor said “This has crossed a line for me, taking the graph beyond the disingenuous sort of misrepresentation that I’m used to seeing from political leaflets and placing it firmly in the territory of outright lying. The numbers were deliberately changed, because the real data didn’t provide enough evidence for the message that the politician wanted to convey.”

All this matters because trust is cumulative in politics - won slowly and squandered quickly. If we normalise the idea that it’s OK to play fast and loose with data visualisation - that graphics are there to generate heat rather than light - we train voters to distrust all numbers on election paraphernalia, not just the cooked ones.

But maybe this is what’s needed: for the electorate to look at the numbers with due scepticism. We need people to common-sense check the differences between the bars to see if they stack up. If something doesn’t seem right then compare the picture to the official source - in this case, the council’s own tally, which gives the lie to the fanciful claim “only Reform can challenge” when the third place party were within 21 votes of them.

Above all, we need voters to remember that graphics can be corrupted. There are myriad ways to lie with statistics. The next time a leaflet insists your vote “can only” do one thing, check to see whether their story survives contact with reality. If it doesn’t, use your vote to demonstrate that you won’t be taken for a fool.

*I’ve seen no evidence that this tactic is being successful. Through a reverse image search I’ve failed to find any online versions of the image on the internet at all and none of the local Conservative social media accounts seem to have posted anything about it.