Anyone use Next Door? Here’s how to use it to encourage tactically voting and vote swapping to Stop Brexit.
So here’s my latest Remoaner wheeze, and I hope I can encourage a few of you who use Next door to do the same.
I’ve set up a group called “London remainers voting tactically or vote swapping for a second referendum” (please join!), the purpose being to educate and explain about how tactical voting works, how it’s perfectly legal to swap your vote in one constituency, for another vote in a different constituency, and how you go about it. The ultimate aim is to achieve a hung Parliament, a second referendum and a remain outcome. You should be able to search for this group easily if you're in Northcote rd area, Tonleys, Wandsworth Common etc.
For those not on Next Door, when you join, you’re part of a small local neighbourhood, mine has 1,288 households in it. But when you post you can reach a number of other similar hoods adjacent to yours and when you add all of those up, you get 12,400, and to put that in perspective, that’s getting on for 18% of your average constituency of about 70k. That is a serious number of people you can influence.Now ND have pretty strict rules about political posting (I’ve just come off a two week ban). You can advertise a LOCAL event, like a march or hustings, but you can’t make any comment that’s likely to engender a wider debate about a national issue, ie Brexit. However, you can invite all 12,400 of those people into your group and within it, you can say whatever you like.
I thought I would approach EU nationals to join the group first, both because I thought they were one demographic group very likely to be narked at Brexit and also because that same group may not be very familiar with how our first past the post system works. So by googling and asking friends and fam, I found out some of the most popular Christian names of French/Spanish/Italian/German/Polish people. Once your group is set up, you can ‘search by name’, and you get a list of people with that (or very similar) names, that you can then invite to your group, with a note explaining what the group’s all about.
I’ve only just set up my group, so no idea how well this is going to work, but it doesn’t take long to do, and strikes me as a great way of getting the tactical voting and vote swap message out there. Lots of brits have no idea you can vote swap and many mistakenly think it’s illegal (it’s not), so this needs debunking widely.
https://www.swapmyvote.uk/faq
When you first apply, Next door (I think) need to post you a code to verify that you live where you’re saying you do. Given Christmas post season coming up, if you’re not already on it, I’d apply pronto.
One final point, useful as it is, Next door will never be a patch on the FAB Nappyvalleynet community, just feel we need to use every tool at our disposal.
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thanks for the lovely comment Guy!
