The Liberal Democrats have been accused of misleading voters after a number of candidates published leaflets featuring data from an obscure company that is not a member of the British Polling Council to suggest they are ahead of other parties in various constituencies.

The election material citing data from Flavible has been criticised for using national polls and localising them to project the voting intention for certain constituencies.

Lib Dem candidates have used Flavible projections in their leaflets in York Outer, Esher and Walton, the Islington North seat of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Putney, Enfield Southgate, Woking, Oxford East, and Westminster and City, where Chuka Umunna is running.

The British Polling Council confirmed that Flavible was not one of its members.

Flavible was created as a blogging site in 2015 by University of Plymouth students George Rushton and Saad Bhatty. It published articles submitted by other students and republished articles from The Conversation. The website was transformed into a company specialising in seat projection and statistical analysis in early 2019 by Rushton, with an appeal to supporters on Patreon.

In York Outer, the Lib Dem election material for the general election cites projections from Flavible to portray a two-way race with the Conservatives, noting that “Labour won’t win, but their voters can help beat the Tory MP by lending their vote to the Lib Dem.” But in 2017, the Conservative MP Julian Sturdy held his seat in York Outer, winning 29,356 votes, while Labour candidate came in second place, winning 21,067 votes. The LibDem candidate finished third with 5,910 votes.

In analyses in July and August, the fact-checking site Full Fact criticised the Lib Dems’ use of Flavible, which had drawn on previous polling by YouGov and Survation to make claims about their candidates’ likelihood of winning key seats. They included a prediction, which Full Fact concluded was incorrect, that Corbyn would lose his seat to the Lib Dems despite the Labour leader winning the seat in 2017 with 73% of the vote.

A spokesperson for Full Fact said: “It’s notoriously hard to reliably convert national polling results to local area. Flavible have, to their credit, explained their methodology. But political parties shouldn’t mislead voters by suggesting these results are reliable at the constituency level.

“And for politicians to say that these results are from “polling” – something we’ve had to fact check more than once already – is simply misleading.”

Andrew Gwynne MP, Labour’s national campaign co-ordinator, said: “The Lib Dems have no credibility and should apologise for trying to mislead voters.



“The last time Jo Swinson and her party were as close to the Tories as these charts claim, they were in government voting for the bedroom tax, privatising the NHS, tripling tuition fees and cutting taxes for the super-rich and big business.”

Damian Lyons Lowe, the founder and chief executive of Survation, said Flavible’s model uses a simple methodology that compares the headline results in an opinion poll with the previous general election and applies the swing to each party contesting a seat.

“Uniform national swing is unlikely to be able to capture accurately the specific dynamics occurring in a single seat – that does not mean such estimates outside of our control are incorrect, but exercises that capture the dynamics of a single-seat – such as constituency polls or modelling techniques such as multilevel regression and post stratification are much more likely to be an accurate reflection,” Lowe said.

Will Jennings, the professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southampton, said: “Traditionally it was possible to use national polls to project results on to constituency results, as swing was relatively uniform across the country. Increasingly, though, there are substantial geographical variations in how parties are doing.

“As a result, support in national polls provides fairly noisy information about how a party might be doing in a particular area. This is even more complicated in 2019 due to various local pacts between parties and the number of independents standing.”

Lowe added that the Lib Dems will be the beneficiaries of tactical voting in this general election and therefore keen to demonstrate the turnaround in their fortunes since 2017. In Esher and Walton, Lowe said the party took first place with 38% of the vote in the 2019 European elections, according to the academic Chris Hanretty’s estimate, and came second behind the Conservatives with 22% of the vote in the Elmbridge borough council elections. The equivalent figures for the Labour party were 13% and 7%.

A Lib Dem spokesperson said: “Flavible projections are not used on national campaigns. Every time Flavible projections have been used by local campaigns, the source of the data is clear.”

When asked for comment, Flavible responded by linking to its methodology section on its website.

• This article was amended on 5 November 2019 to correct the spelling of Saad Bhatty’s name.