In his letter of January 19, Laurie Taylor questions Nicholas Frank’s earlier statement that MP?Sarah Wollaston had a “large majority” in the 2017 election.

Unfortunately for Mr Taylor, both his logic and arithmetic are faulted.

He is wrong to include in his analysis those who did not vote, a common mistake, as Cllr Jonathan Hawkins made when he foolishly referred to 96 per cent of the South Hams electorate as not being bothered to vote in the recent West Devon/South Hams merger survey. Mr Taylor speculates that the non-voters are “probably not natural Tory voters and/or are apathetic about politics and/or are disenfranchised by our unfit-for-purpose voting systems”.

He speculates too far. There are numerous likely reasons for not voting, such as having died, being too ill to vote; being out of the country and, most importantly in this case, those Conservatives who find voting difficult for some reason and decline to do so believing correctly that their candidate will have a large majority.

For obvious reasons attempted analysis of voting preferences should not include non-voters.

The second of Laurie Taylor’s statements that I take issue with is his assertion that “In this constituency, an astonishing 72 per cent of the votes were wasted”.

This figure is indeed astonishing because it is nonsense. It is nonsense for two reasons.

Firstly, it seems to be a botched attempt, wrongly using the figures, to include the non-voters as wasted votes.

Secondly, a knowledge of the level of support for a non-successful party is valuable for planning future election tactics for winning this or another seat. Almost anything is possible in the south west and nationally, of course, each of the parties who contestied the Totnes constituency is represented in Parliament.

Returning to the description of Dr Wollaston’s election result, her vote was twice that for Labour, despite the injection of support from the Corbynistas, four times that for the Liberal Democrats, ten times the Greens and twenty times UKIP. Such large majorities could even be termed a massive win.

Finally, the concluding statement in his letter is also in error. He states that Dr Wollaston can only claim to represent 39.4 per cent of her electorate in Parliament.

This is not so, once elected she represents all her constituents. Such is the duty and privilege of all Members of Parliament.

Brian Parker

Crossparks, Dartmouth