Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
With tactical voting it could skew it massively. Of if a hypothetical party was “list only”. The Greens have tried to encourage this however the SNP are not so complacent as to do so.
The SNP could sweep the board in a constituency vote and a hypothetical party eat up half of the list seats through not having their regional vote adjusted on the basis of constituency seats.
Could conceivably be the best outcome though for our concerned English members who want to save on Barnett consequentials.
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All of that is possible, but we still only get one list vote each. The splinter faction would have to persuade a lot of people who have given their constituency vote to the SNP withhold from them their list vote, and give it to the splinter instead. Proportional voting is still relatively novel in the UK and the system used for Holyrood (the additional member system, not D’Hondt, as I incorrectly stated earlier) is not the same as is used in Scottish councils or Euro-elections (which did use the D’Hondt system). That means the Holyrood additional member system has only ever been used a handful of times by anyone. It is far from clear that the sort of tactical vote switching Alex Salmond would require can be successfully communicated to enough voters to make a difference.
There is a threshold below which it’s effectively impossible to gain any list seats because there aren’t enough of them to go round for the system to be absolutely proportional. That’s what eventually did for Tommy Sheridan and his merry band of tinpot revolutionaries in the Scottish Socialist Party. People were still voting for them, just not in enough numbers for them to get even one list seat in each region.