Sir – John Woodford is playing fast and loose with statistics for partisan purposes (Travesty of justice, letter, June 25).

He lumps together those who voted other than for the Tories with the 62 per cent of the electorate who didn’t bother to vote at all. From this he concludes that (only) “16 per cent of the total electorate control 70 per cent of the . . . county council”.

What he is doing here is either a trick, or it displays a failure to understand how elections work.

Neither he, nor I, nor anybody else, has the faintest idea about the individual preferences of those 62 per cent.

For all we know, they may be solid Tory supporters, or solid Labour supporters, or they may detest all the parties equally, or not understand or not care about any of the parties’ platforms either way.

The truth is, probably, that their preferences are distributed roughly in the same proportion as those who voted, other than the (relatively small, in all likelihood) percentage who make up those last three categories.

But in any case, it doesn’t matter a jot: they chose not to vote, therefore their putative votes do not ‘count’ (figuratively) and should not be counted (literally) when looking at the election results, and they certainly should not be put forward as alleged supporters of the writer’s personal party preferences.

Only the known preferences of those who did vote can be analysed meaningfully.

John Kinory Steeple Aston