As widely expected, Nigel Farage won the Clacton by-election, securing over twice as many votes as his nearest rival.
The contest was interesting though, not only for marking Count Binface's best performance, but also for featuring a modern record 34 candidates. (This BBC page says 35, in the caption below the picture at the top, as well as 34, but I believe it's 34 that's right.)
While this is a lot for the UK, it is far from a world record. The 2023 Toronto mayoral by-election featured over 100 candidates (see here and here). It's a good job that voters weren't required to rank all of the candidates! But I digress...
Since the 'main' parties decided not to stand in Clacton, most of the 34 are independents or fringe parties. Some are serial candidates and/or arguably part of a tradition of joke candidates. Interestingly, they include three candidates from the Monster Raving Loony Party - which makes sense only because voters vote for a candidate, rather than a party.
Most of these were largely irrelevant. Besides Farage and Binface, none received the 5% of the vote needed to return their deposit. Indeed, none of the others received even 500 votes, with 3rd place on just 492 votes. I make it that 21 of them received fewer than 100 votes and three of them received fewer than ten votes (which is the number of signatures one needs in order to stand, as documented here).
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