Why every vote matters in this election

Out of 650 constituencies voting in the General Election on Thursday, the results in at least 600 of them are already a foregone conclusion. They are mostly either solid Tory seats or solid Labour seats, with a few solid LibDem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Green – or in Northern Ireland: DUP, SDLP, Sinn Fein or UUP seats. If you live in one of those solid seats, whichever way you vote the winner is likely to be the person belonging to the party that always wins that seat.

There are exceptions, of course: there are upsets and surprises and crazy things that happen at elections. A solid Tory seat in East Devon, for instance, could go to an Independent candidate this time. In Scotland, dozens of solid Labour seats suddenly became solid SNP seats at the last election. Anything can happen. But it probably won’t. Most of those seats are taken, and if there are a few surprises, it will likely be only a few.

But does that mean your vote doesn’t matter if you live in one of those constituencies – that you might as well not vote at all, since it won’t affect the outcome? Possibly more than at any election in living memory, your vote does matter, even in the safest seats in the land. And that is for the simple reason that we are almost certain to get a hung parliament on Friday, with no clear, overall ‘winner’.

Although the only thing that ‘counts’, officially, is the total number of seats which each party wins in the election, the reality is that the total ‘popular vote’ is going to matter in this election, because for either of the main two parties to form a minority government, they need some sort of mandate from the people. And that mandate is most easily measured in terms of the percentages of total votes cast for each party.

If, as was predicted when the election was called back in April, the Labour Party were to get less than 30% of the total votes cast while the Conservatives got closer to 50%, it would be very difficult for Labour to claim any kind of mandate for forming a government, with or without the LibDems or any other party forming a coalition of some kind. In fact, if the election results turned out looking like that, let’s face it: Jeremy Corbyn would be finished and Theresa May would be unassailable, no matter how many seats each party ended up winning.

If, on the other hand, the Labour Party ends up with closer to 40% of the total vote, with the Conservatives on around 40%, as the polls have been suggesting more recently, then Labour is in a very much stronger position to form a government, even without a clear majority of seats in parliament. And, of course, if the Labour Party were to pull in closer to 50% of the vote while the Conservatives fell back to closer to 30%, then Jeremy Corbyn would be without a doubt the next Prime Minister, even without necessarily winning enough seats to form a majority government.

So, even if you are voting in one of the already-sewn-up safe Tory or Labour (or other party) seats, voting Labour really does matter, even if it won’t win you a Labour MP (or you are guaranteed a Labour MP whether you vote Labour or not). Voting Labour in every safe seat matters because it is the only way to increase the overall share of votes and give Jeremy Corbyn a clear mandate to govern.

And, of course, in those 50 or so remaining seats where there is not a clear-cut winner before the voting even takes place, how you vote matters very much. In most of these marginal constituencies, every single vote is needed to ensure a Labour victory. The Conservatives won seats at the last election with as few as 27 votes – just 28 people could have overturned that result!

In that particular constituency (Gower in Wales), those 28 people could have come from those who voted Green, Plaid Cymru, LibDem, Independent or TUSC. Voting for any one of those parties basically gave that seat to the Conservatives in 2015. But there were also 19,062 registered voters in Gower who didn’t vote at all in the 2015 General Election. If just 0.15% of those people had voted – and voted Labour – they would now have a Labour MP instead of a Conservative one.

That’s how important your vote can be, and this election is guaranteed to be a very closely fought thing in some of those constituencies. There are many more factors at play than in 2015, including the collapse of the UKIP vote, a resurgence of the LibDems, people voting against Brexit and people wanting to make sure they get Brexit…

Every vote matters, and in some constituencies, that means voting for a party other than Labour in order to ensure we get a Labour government – however contradictory that may sound. By voting Labour in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, for instance, you are in effect giving your vote to the Conservatives, because Labour has zero chance of winning that seat, but the SNP were within just 798 votes of winning it in 2015.

So be strategic in your voting, but whatever you do, vote! Because every vote matters for a people’s victory on Thursday. This election really can be won, but it will take every single vote to make it happen.

If you are not sure whether your constituency is a safe seat or a hotly contest one, check here