NO politician can – nor should – look at any election anywhere without wanting to learn from it.

As I write this on Friday the trend is good for Biden but the ghastly unfolding of the Presidential contest has lots of warnings for Scotland about polling error, confirmatory bias, and over-expectation.

However most important of all for the cause of independence is the warning about how keen some are to shred democracy for their own narrow political ends and how dangerous it would be to let them.

We had more than a hint of a willingness to do that close to home this week when, with no sense of timing but with his usual blustering arrogance, the Secretary of State against Scotland asserted that he intended the will of a Tory junta unelected by Scotland to prevail – for years – no matter what Scottish voters want.

Well it won’t, because Democracy 101 has at its very core the need – and it is bizarre to have to say it – to obey not the imperious demands of the oligarchs but the calm collective will of the people.

“ STOP THE COUNT” is what the President of the United States tweeted when he woke up on Thursday morning and the day just got worse, culminating in a stream of falsehoods broadcast live and echoed by his family and supporters as part of an organised, though desperate, attempt to rig the election.

Election rigging in America is nothing new. A century ago New York’s Tammany Hall leant its name to the very definition of electoral corruption but more recently one of the most powerful mayors in the country had (allegedly) an electoral official called “Short Pencil Louis” whose job was to rub out the votes for other candidates and put in a vote for his boss before the ballot papers were allowed to be counted.

Fortunately, more honest heads in America always prevail, hard as it is to fight such abuses. They will prevail again this time too.

But as we head towards a crucial independence election and then an independence referendum we need to beware the inclination of those with power but without a basic sense of decency or – in the UK Tory case – electoral support to use any tool to get their way.

Consequently each and every action we take– including the laws we pass about how we organise elections – have to be focused on ensuring the maximum degree of protection for the act of voting, for accurately counting the vote and for seeing the wishes of the people honoured.

That also means protecting the franchise. The attempts in the United States to suppress registration and voting are as bad as those to stop votes that have been alraedy cast taking effect yet we have already heard much nonsense here from opponents of independence like George Galloway regarding who should or shouldn’t be allowed to take part.

There is only one democratic answer to that question and it was given in the Franchise Bill passed at Holyrood earlier this year. The future of Scotland must be decided by the people who live here. Residency is what counts. But we must do more.

A fractured democracy in which one side attempts to defeat the other by non-democratic means must never be accepted as legitimate.

“Stop the Count” may be Trump’s cry, but “Dont let them vote” is the Tory (and Labour) one. Both are offensively anti democratic and neither can be allowed to stand.

Yet protesting them is not just the obligation of those most immediately affected. We need to tell the world these tactics are not just being used in Wisconsin, they are being used by Westminster and we must persuade the world that the defence of democracy in Montrose is as necessary as action in its defence in Minsk or Michigan.

A fractured democracy also needs healing. Biden’s speech on Wednesday night was a fine attempt to do so but there will be much more required in the coming days, weeks and months.

So we need to bear in mind as we pursue our goal that there are those who will feel every bit as hurt in losing as we did in 2014 and sometimes every bit as bitter as some Trump supporters.

The tone of the campaign and the inclusivity of its aftermath will both, therefore, be vital just as they are this morning across the once great United States which has been grievously injured by four years of demagoguery and for whom the nightmare is not yet quite over.