The peasant's guide to what the fuck is going to happen on Friday

David Cameron and Ed Milliband have spent the last couple of months campaigning for your vote on a completely false premise.

They both made a rather desperate presumption that their party would command an overall majority in the Commons after the general election. They were wrong. As the polls have shown for some time, the Conservatives and Labour Party are almost neck-and-neck, and look set to win just under 35% of the national vote each. For those who aren't quite familiar with our system of Government (and you would be forgiven - it's ridiculously archaic, unwritten and complex), here's a quick lowdown of the basics.

We operate on a "First Past The Post" system. It's the simplest electoral system out there, and has survived so long because the two biggest parties absolutely love it for the advantages it gives them over smaller, marginal parties. In your constituency, the candidate who gets the most votes becomes MP. Votes for any other candidate, or votes for the candidate that wins that exceed the amount needed to win, are completely redundant and count for nothing. WOO! Combine this with political parties altering voting boundaries for their own benefit, and this is why we end up with scenarios such as this:

Think of it as a system of "the winner takes it all" - your constituency could cast 1000 votes for Labour, 1000 votes for UKIP and 1001 for the Conservatives, and the result will be a single Tory MP, even though two out of every three voters in the area didn't want one. It's easy to understand, and keeps minority parties out: this is why the nation voted to keep it in a 2011 referendum, when the BNP extremists were still fashionable and the cowardly Lib Dems had sapped the public's faith in minority parties.

So that's how your MP is elected, but what about the Government? Who becomes Prime Minister is decided in a much more complex fashion.

Our Government is formed from prominent MPs of any party that can command a majority (having more MPs than all the other parties combined) in the House of Commons. Traditionally, having this majority was necessary because if your party cannot outvote all the others, they're going to table a vote of no confidence as soon as they can at the start of the next Parliament and oust you.

In 2010, we saw something different. Neither Labour nor Conservatives won an overall majority (which is about 324 MPs, I think), so they then bargained with the Lib Dems to form a coalition. The two parties formally pledge to work together, vote together on key issues and share Government offices. By adding Lib Dem MPs to Tory MPs, you have over 324 and therefore a majority to govern.

For some reason, the main parties bloody hated coalition Government. Who would've thought political parties would be so opposed to compromise and not getting everything their own way, eh? Ed Milliband has flat out refused to enter coalition with the SNP. The Conservatives have said the same. The Lib Dems, desperate to cling on to the little power they have, are selling themselves as the party of coalition, and have publicly slutted themselves out to every party except the SNP and UKIP.

So if, after the election, the parties CAN'T form a formal coalition, what happens? Do we have another election? Does the country crumble and Downing Street get demolished? Unfortunately not - we have a whole series of uncodified, archaic rules that nobody really knows what to do with in this situation.

It's possible for Governments to operate without a minority on an informal "supply" agreement with other parties. For example, the Tories could do this with the Lib Dems or UKIP. They'd form a minority Tory Government, but would be blackmailed to keep the supporting parties happy through their policies by the threat of a no confidence vote.

We could see a bizzare situation in which the Tories and Lib Dems actually just refuse to leave Downing Street. If there's no majority, and parties cannot form a coalition, the previous Government can basically put it's boots up on the desk and go "well if you lot can't get anything better sorted out, we'll just stay here then". The previous Tory-Lib Dem government would remain in place until the other parties formed some kind of coalition or agreement that was fit for the task. As the Cabinet rules state:

Where an election does not result in an overall majority for a single party, the incumbent government remains in office unless and until the Prime Minister tenders his or her resignation and the Government’s resignation to the Sovereign. An incumbent government is entitled to wait until the new Parliament has met to see if it can command the confidence of the House of Commons, but is expected to resign if it becomes clear that it is unlikely to be able to command that confidence and there is a clear alternative.

So it's possible, depending on election results, that the ConDems could just sit in the cabinet office and watch how things pan out, and leave the pressure on Ed Milliband to try and form a better Government without the support of the Lib Dems or SNP.

A vote of no confidence can be tabled at any time in Parliament. If over half of the House of Commons votes against the current Government, the Prime Minister must immediately ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call another general election. This is why having a majority is so important.

So guys, make sure you vote with all your will on Thursday. God fucking forbid we have to sit through another one of these shitty elections in 2015.