Londoners On Bikes

On the website there are only four candidates on the 'candidate of the week.'
What about the three others?

Here an answer for you...

Why doesn’t Londoners on Bikes have all seven mayoral candidates on its front page?

LoB is focusing only on the cycling policies of candidates from the four main parties – Boris Johnson (Con), Ken Livingstone (Lab), Jenny Jones (Green) and Brian Paddick (Lib Dem).
We do not display Carlos Cortiglia (BNP), Lawrence James Webb (Fresh Choice for London) or Siobhan Benita (Independent) on our front page because none of them have made cycling central to their campaign, and we therefore consider it extremely unlikely that we will recommend voting for them at the election.

This is because our voting recommendation will aim to make the best possible use of the current electoral system to achieve our goal of safer roads for Londoners on bikes. The mayoral election will be run on the Supplementary Vote system. This means that voters are asked to cast a vote for their favourite candidate, and also have the opportunity to place a second-choice vote for their second choice for mayor. If a candidate wins more than half of the total first choice votes cast, they are elected mayor. If no candidate gets a majority of first-preference votes, all but the top two candidates are eliminated. Second preference votes for the two remaining candidates on ballot papers of the eliminated candidates are then counted. The candidate with the most first choice and second choice votes is elected mayor.

Under this system, voters’ first choices can be made “from the heart”, while the second should be made “from the head” – putting your favourite candidate overall in first place allows you to express the way you would ideally like the city to be governed. But the second preference vote should be given to one of the two candidates most likely to enter the run-off if you want your vote to contribute to the final outcome.

Therefore, when Londoners on Bikes makes a voting recommendation, we will recommend that our voting bloc gives their first preference vote to the candidate who has promised to do the most for cyclists. If this candidate is not either Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson (who, given polling data, will almost inevitably be the two candidates in the run-off election) then we will recommend that our voting bloc gives their second preference vote to one of these two, to ensure that whichever is elected is aware of the need to prioritise bike safety.

This means that we will not under any circumstances be recommending two minor candidates for our voting bloc’s two votes. For that reason the candidates who are minor and who have not placed any emphasis on cycling during their campaign are likely to be irrelevant to us. If this changes, and these minority candidates begin to make serious enough pledges on cycling to compete for our first-preference votes, then we will add them to our front page.