My vote for awareness

In your article “Election ads fail to woo non-voters” (MW last week), you claim that our campaign failed to persuade non-voters to vote at the elections in May. We believe that the statistic you quote to make this assertion (43 per cent of people claiming to “decide to vote” as a result of seeing our ad) is actually an encouraging rather than disappointing result.

One of the Electoral Commission’s responsibilities is to increase public awareness of and engagement in the democratic process. Our campaign’s primary aim was therefore to raise awareness of the election dates, how and where to find out more information and why it is important to participate. We consider it a very good result that 75 per cent of people were aware of our campaign and of those 88 per cent understood our campaign’s message.

Angela Salt

Director of communication

The Electoral Commission

London SW1