# Vote Leave The designated lead campaign for a Leave vote in the June 23, 2016 referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union ([[Brexit]]) — the campaign that won, 51.9 to 48.1, and the case study the vault uses for how a data-driven, rule-breaking, single-message operation beats a conventional one. It was formed in October 2015 by Matthew Elliott (of the TaxPayers' Alliance) and [[Dominic Cummings]], won the Electoral Commission's designation in April 2016 over [[Nigel Farage]]'s [[Leave.EU]] — which was backed by Arron Banks and worked with [[Cambridge Analytica]]'s milieu — and was fronted by [[Boris Johnson]] and Michael Gove, whose decision to join it in February 2016 gave it the Conservative establishment figures Farage's outfit lacked. ## The method Cummings ran it as a startup: one message ("Take Back Control"), one number (the "£350 million a week" sent to Brussels, painted on the bus and promised to the NHS — a gross figure the UK Statistics Authority called misleading), and a late, enormous digital spend. Vote Leave put about £2.7 million, roughly 40% of its budget, through the Canadian firm AggregateIQ for Facebook advertising in the final days, targeting voters its models identified as persuadable and never reachable by the broadcast campaign — a billion ad impressions, by Cummings's later account, most of them in the last week. Immigration (the "Turkey is joining the EU" posters) carried the closing argument. The [[Cambridge Analytica]] and [[Media Theory and the Right-Wing Media Apparatus]] pages treat this as the moment the tools of American micro-targeting proved themselves in a national vote. ## The overspend The spending limit for a designated campaign was £7 million. Vote Leave came within £600,000 of it and then donated £625,000 to [[BeLeave]], a nominally independent youth group run by a 23-year-old, which spent it on AggregateIQ — the same vendor, the same targeting — in what the Electoral Commission found in July 2018 to be a coordinated plan to evade the cap ([[Vote Leave Overspend]]). The Commission fined Vote Leave £61,000 and referred its officials to the police; the whistleblower was BeLeave's [[Shahmir Sanni]], whose outing by a Downing Street aide became its own scandal, and the reporting was [[Carole Cadwalladr]]'s. The finding never touched the result: there is no mechanism in British law to re-run a referendum for a campaign-finance breach, and by 2018 the people who had run the campaign were running the country. ## See Also - [[Brexit]] · [[Dominic Cummings]] · [[Boris Johnson]] · [[Nigel Farage]] · [[Leave.EU]] - [[Vote Leave Overspend]] · [[BeLeave]] · [[Shahmir Sanni]] · [[Carole Cadwalladr]] · [[Cambridge Analytica]] - [[Media Theory and the Right-Wing Media Apparatus]] · [[International Far-Right Networks]]