Not voting is not only a waste of your own vote, but your vote helps all the other people who vote your way.

As well as a minimum 25% turnout, a yes vote also has to reach 50% of the aggregate rateable value.

Besides more votes by number, the YES side also requires their votes to have more combined property Rateable Value (RV), to win the ballot. 

Please remember that the NO side does not require property RV, only more votes by number! At the VMS TBID ballot in January 2020, out of 378 liable properties, 141 cast a vote (37.3% turnout), of which 106 were cast YES, and 35 were cast NO. However, 237 did NOT cast a vote!. It only required 72 of those non-voters to actually vote NO to have tipped the ballot into a NO vote!  This is why it is important to chase your Ballot papers and vote!

Those are the rules, and the TBID was voted in based on those rules. But it also means that more than 200 businesses didn’t vote. A less-than 40% turnout is a poor show. If there’s one thing we ask, please use your vote before 20 March. In our view, a turnout of less than 50% doesn’t give credibility to any vote; it’s simply not a big enough sample. And it is also our view that people who don’t vote are likely to have voted no. Some even believe that if they didn’t vote, they wouldn’t have to pay the levy. That, of course, wasn’t the case.

Now, back then, there wasn’t an alternative. There had been a publicly-funded body called Moray Speyside Tourism, which had run for six years. It was this organisation that put the prospect of a TBID* on the table to allow it to continue to operate. It was a fair expectation that the TBID would have continued the same business model.

*DMO – Destination Marketing Organisation; TBID – Tourism Business Improvement District