THE most important election in the brief history of the devolved Scottish Parliament is upon us.
At stake is the opportunity to vote again on independence and to decide how the nation recovers from the pandemic.
But before everyone gets the popcorn out to see how events unfold, it’s important to know how it all works.
This is everything you need to know about the Holyrood voting system.
WHAT TYPE OF SYSTEM IS IT?
Unlike Westminster’s outdated First Past The Post system, the devolved Scottish Parliament adopted a Proportional Representation system when it was set up in 1999.
Specifically, Holyrood has an Additional Members System. It combines two separate methods of voting, one for constituencies and one for regional lists.
MAKE UP OF THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT
A total of 129 members are elected to Holyrood.
A total of 73 MSPs are elected via constituency votes, while 56 come from regional lists.
Scotland is split into eight regions, with each region containing between eight and 10 constituencies.
The eight regions are
- Central Scotland
- Glasgow
- Highlands and Islands
- Lothian
- Mid-Scotland and Fife
- North East Scotland
- South Scotland
- West Scotland
So people in Scotland are each represented by eight MSPs – one from their constituency and seven from their region.
This is how the results panned out during the last election, in 2016.
HOW DOES IT ALL WORK?
The constituency vote, or the first vote, works just as Westminster elections do, with the candidate who wins the most votes winning the seat.
It doesn’t matter how many votes or what proportion of the ballot they win, just as long they get the most. That means a substantial percentage of votes will ultimately not impact the result.
It is this inherent unfairness which caused the founders of the devolved Scottish Parliament to establish a “second vote”, on the regional list.
In this vote, which uses something call the D’Hondt method, electors select a party instead of a candidate.
Seats are allocated proportionally, with the total dependent on the number of constituency seats already won.
Each party’s regional vote is divided by one more than the number of seats it has won so far in that region, including constituencies. This effectively means the more constituency seats a party wins, the fewer list seats it will win.
On average, parties usually need around 5-6% of the vote to win a seat in their region. So if a party won 12% of the regional vote, it would expect to win two seats. If it didn’t win any in the constituency, it would be two list seats. But if it did have a constituency seat, it’d be one list seat, and so on.
This way, fewer votes are wasted, with the results in each region more accurately reflecting the proportion of votes cast for each party in that area.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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