‘Everything you suppose you understand about election night time is incorrect’

It is often claimed, usually by whoever is likely to lose, that voting for any party other than the two most likely to win ‘splits the vote’ and is anti-democratic.

We’re also told, today, that too many people voting for the other guy is too much democracy, that asking questions of politicians is too much free speech, and that there is too much power in the wrong hands.

But once it was claimed werewolves were demonic creatures out to steal sheep, terrorise rural communities and generally rip throats out of anyone they found. Medieval court records show those accused of turning into such creatures often claimed to be servants of God, battling the Devil on behalf of, er, rural communities, who were generally jolly grateful the hairy vigilantes were on their side.

Not quite the same kind of horror movie, is it? And democracy is equally less-scary than those who might be victims of it would like you to think.

The last person who had ‘too much power’ was Charles I, and ever since both it and his head were taken away, every politician and monarch has had precisely the amount of power given to them by the people. No, the electorate wasn’t very broad for much of it, but you could make the argument that even for absolute rulers, the will of the people often picked and deposed them – London chose Edward IV, East Anglia voted for Mary I, quite a lot of everyone was firmly against John, Henry VI and Edward III, and unpopularity among peasants and barons alike put them all in proper political pickles.

Nowadays we don’t have to form mobs to get our point across, and our voices can be heard more clearly through the ballot box. Whether Keir Starmer takes power with a majority of 1 or 501, that’s what people will have voted for. It will be, therefore, the precise amount of power required – not too much, nor too little. The Goldilocks quotient, if you like. The amount that WE SAY.

The idea that the public should support someone only the ‘right’ amount, that our voices should ask not too loudly, and what we desire should be limited in case everyone else wants the same, is what’s really anti-democratic.

A leader’s power will be ‘too little’ only if a majority makes it hard to govern without compromise, and ‘too much’ if a leader can govern without check. But arguably, if there are hundreds of backbenchers who can’t be bought off with a government job, there’ll be more rebels and headaches with an outsized majority. More democracy for us, more scrutiny for them.

The people who say there is such a thing as too much power – which they’d never say if it was them that was going to get it – are already claiming the only reason they’ll fail is because someone split the vote.

This line will be repeated often enough to become established fact. That the Tories only lost, Labour only won, Ed Davey only has more MPs than Nigel, because your vote was somehow reduced, devalued, erased, because you voted the wrong way.

But that’s the beauty of a first-past-the-post electoral system. As insurgent party leader Count Binface pointed out on my News Agenda show this morning, the winner has only to get one more vote than the second-placed. And if Rishi Sunak can’t get one more vote than Labour in his own constituency, then it’s Sunak’s loss and nobody else’s.

If you vote for a joke candidate, you are still voting. Your voice is as powerful – perhaps more so – than voting for one of the main parties. It is a vote for none of the above, a vote to prick pomposity, a vote to make whoever wins, and whoever loses, look as ridiculous as possible. If you add up all the satirical votes across the nation, you might even poll more than Reform.

There are a number of politicians and monarchs over the centuries who’ve likewise claimed It Was The Plebs Wot Lost It: it is the equivalent of saying ‘the dog ate my popularity’. And it works, in the bunfight around a general election, up until the point they all enter a harshly-lit sports hall at gone midnight and start biting their nails.

It is in those local coliseums where winners and losers are subjected to the same power: ours. It is the only place where, indisputably, a black voice is as loud as a white one, where male and female are equal, where it doesn’t matter if you’re trans or how you feel about someone who is. Every piece of paper is worth the same, every cross has value, and no vote is wasted. Even spoilt ballots are counted.

I’ve been at those counts, watched the candidates pace the tables, give optimistic sound bites and then rise to glory or fall from view. I’ve seen people who wield great power quietly wait while a nameless volunteer counts the support, and a local council official declares whether their time has come or gone.

It is always a quiet joy to see those who usually feel they have a right to tell others what to do stop, and wait to do as they are told. By 4am everyone’s got coffee breath, sweaty kecks, gritty eyes and a brain that’s not firing on all cylinders. You don’t see that on the election night round-ups or livefeeds, but it matters that every single politician’s knees turn to jelly, and it was you who did it.

We cannot all be in the pub to boo Liz Truss; we cannot all shake the hand of whoever walks into Downing Street. But we can all send our vote to that municipal building, and have it counted, while we give whatever amount of power we choose to whomever we want to wield it.

We do not ask our neighbours who they support. We do not decide how many MPs is enough. We have for centuries decided who to back and who to shun, and on Thursday – or earlier, if we did it by post – we get to do it again, without having to leave our hovels, brandish pitchforks or die in battle.

Anyone who tells you any that of that is wrong, in the tiniest respect, is not worth your vote. But it is worth making them stay up all night just to be humiliated, and watch them grump all over the news next day that the silly voters voted too much, or too little, or in the wrong places, or for a man who dressed up as a dustbin.

Once upon a time, the authorities didn’t know how to handle werewolves, and said we should be as afraid as they were. They are trying the same trick now with democracy. Remember: it’s not you that needs to be worried.