* In case you don’t know (and why should you?) NOTA stands for ‘none of the above’. The ERS is keen to advance real voting democracy, and wants all future elections to have the NOTA option on the ballot form. While some observers see it as an essentially negative vote, The Slog’s view has for some time been that if all your constituency Party candidates have an appeal in the minus space, you should be able to say so. You never know, it might send a message back to the Swines.**

** This is The Slog’s new abbreviation for ‘SW1 Not Entirely Sane’. Yes, I know the real plural of swine is swine, but people think you’re acting in the singular when you say “swine”.

These are the hard facts: had the NOTA vote been allowed, there would’ve been an anti-Swines landslide. Actual seats are first, and notional NOTA seats are in brackets:

NOTA: 0 / (431)

Conservatives: 307 / (173)

Liberal Democrats: 57 / (25)

Labour: 258 / (20)

Others: 26 / (1 Sinn Fein)

The key statistic here is the decimation of Labour, which got just 20 seats.

If this seems odd – although it feels comfortingly rational to me – we should remember that even Labour MPs with as much as a three quarters share of the turnout would still lose their seats , because many Labour seats have risible turnouts.

So there is a fascinating extrapolation to be made here: a new Party of solid and truly different appeal to the disaffected majority could effectively wipe out Labour as a political force. What’s more, the best the Tories could hope for most of the time would be second place: but with just 137 seats, they’d be a pretty weak Opposition.

The low interest-level of the existing Parties in this genuine expansion of democratic choice is thus jolly easy to understand. Especially among the Labouring ranks, where only Diane Abbott of the leadership candidates would’ve survived….with even that result going right down to the wire of several recounts.

It certainly makes you think. Chiefly, it makes me think that our electoral system is probably the most unrepresentative in the world. Looked at in the above light, our unrecorded apathy is constantly re-electing a controlling elite.

Vote NOTA. You know it makes sense.