Explaining how the Holyrood voting system works to Primordial Stew

Welcome to part two of Scot Goes Pop's latest comprehensive Stew coverage, in which I'm going to respond in detail to the characteristically abusive rant he left in the comments section of this blog yesterday afternoon.  The reason I'm doing this part in a separate post is that his comment contained a string of inaccurate claims (in fact, fraudulent is probably the word) about how the Holyrood voting system works, and it's therefore important to bring the corrections to those claims to as much attention as possible.  I'm not naive enough to think his hardcore of brainwashed followers will take the remotest heed of what I'm about to say - Stew could spin a cock and bull story about the Earth being shaped like an inverted rectangle, and the Fan Club would breathlessly say "Outstanding, Rev!  Now we understand!" But planting a little seed can sometimes be of use.  Sometimes people eventually drop out of cults because a tiny sliver of doubt causes them to start asking questions they never would have asked before.

So let's dive in.  I'll take it line by line.

"Never stop being such a hilarious coward, Jimbo."

I think this is supposed to refer to me deleting other misleading comments about the voting system.  Well, if a blog owner deleting comments that breach his moderation policy is a sign of being a "coward", I'm not sure what we'd call a man who reacts to a brief comment on someone else's blog criticising his repugnant views on the Hillsborough disaster by getting his solicitor David Halliday to send legal threats about what will happen if the blog owner doesn't censor the comment out of existence.  "Coward" doesn't really seem a strong enough word to describe such behaviour.  Would even "craven, spineless poltroon" be sufficient?  For those of you unaware of the incident, you can read my full email exchange with David Halliday HERE.

"The entire point is that people who want a pro-indy majority SHOULD vote for other indy parties on the list. If they don't want to take that advice, fine, but that's what the advice should be."

I'll be honest and say I haven't a scooby what the function of that sentence is supposed to be.  If he thinks the idea that independence supporters should vote for pro-independence parties is some sort of radical, incisive observation, he's been listening to the sound of his own voice far too much.

"- If they vote SNP, their vote will DEFINITELY be wasted and Unionists will be elected. We know this."

This is when you know he's deliberately lying and is making a very calculated attempt to deceive his disciples in order to distort their voting choices.  This is when you have every right to be angry with him.  The reason you know he's lying is that what he's said is not the product of naivety or of lack of knowledge or of wishful thinking.  Even Stew is capable of checking Wikipedia, and therefore he knows perfectly well that the SNP have won list seats in every single Holyrood election in history.  In 2021 they took two list seats, in 2016 they took four list seats, and in 2011, the only Holyrood election in which they have ever won an outright majority, they took a whopping sixteen list seats, and grabbed at least one list seat in seven of the eight electoral regions.  There has never been an election in which all SNP list votes have been wasted, which of course can be contrasted with Alba's failure to even come close to winning a single seat in 2021, thus ensuring that 100% of Alba list votes were totally wasted and, to put it in Stew's own terms, "unionists were elected as a result".

Because the scope for a large party to take list seats increases the less well that party does on the constituency ballot, and because the SNP's constituency vote share in current opinion polls is well below what they received in all of the last three Holyrood elections, the opportunity for the SNP to take a substantial number of list seats is higher than in any election since 2007.  If they fail to capitalise on that opportunity, it'll be for one reason only - that they didn't get enough list votes.  Which, of course, is precisely what Stew is trying to ensure happens.

In a nutshell, Stew's claim that list votes for the SNP will "definitely" be wasted and that "we know this" is a deliberate and outrageous lie.  His disciples should hold him accountable for it and demand an apology.  But, of course, they won't.

"- But if they vote for non-SNP indy parties, those parties WILL win seats. So if you care about a pro-indy majority, tell people to vote SNP 1 Other indy 2. You can't MAKE them do it, but you can be truthful and tell them it's the only way to keep those Unionists out. Personally I *don't* care about it..."

And of course with that final sentence he nullifies the piety of his earlier advice - it's merely the advice he supposedly would have hypothetically given if he wanted a pro-independence majority, which he doesn't, so he won't.  He'll instead once again tell his readers to vote Labour or Tory or Reform (almost certainly the latter, given the recent mood music).  But nevertheless he knows that a non-trivial fraction of his disciples don't share his born again British nationalism and do still want independence, so it's important to him to persist with the fairy tales and convince the crew that he'd be telling them to vote against the SNP on the list even if he was still an independence supporter.  Which, of course, he wouldn't, because the logic he has set out is utterly bogus.

The reason the list vote is the more important of the two votes is that the overall composition of parliament is roughly proportional to how people voted on the list ballot.  If you vote for your first choice party on the list, you can be sure that if that party fails to pick up its fair share of constituency seats (or even if it fails to pick up far more than its fair share), it will be fully compensated with seats on the list.  But if you start mucking around with "tactical votes" for second-choice or third-choice parties on the list, you're chucking away the safety net and ensuring that if your first choice party gets an unfair result in constituency seats, it won't be compensated with list seats and will be severely under-represented in the parliament as a whole.

But even if you're conceited enough to think you 'know' exactly how many constituency seats the SNP will win before any votes have been counted, to cast an effective "tactical vote on the list" you'd still need to find an alternative pro-independence party that is actually capable of winning any list seats at all.  Alba is not such a party.  It took only 1.7% of the list vote last time around, which is only about one-third of what it would probably have needed to pick up even a small number of seats.  Opinion polls suggest Alba's popularity has not significantly increased since then.  Other than the SNP, the only pro-indy party capable of winning list seats is the Greens, so if as an SNP supporter you were foolish enough to muck around with "tactical voting", the Greens would be the only possible rational choice.  And we know that Stew doesn't want the Greens to do well, so if he was still an independence supporter he'd undoubtedly be telling his readers to vote SNP on both the constituency and the list ballot - exactly as he did in 2016.

"You don't need to endorse Alba, you could just tell people to vote Green 2. And me and Chris McEleny would both really HATE loads more Green MSPs being elected, so big double win for you! Pro-indy majority AND we're pissed off!"

I've actually just covered that point pretty comprehensively and honestly, and I wasn't saying anything I haven't said umpteen times before, so if it's news to Stew I'd have to conclude, sadly, that he's not quite as devoted a fan of this blog as he sometimes appears to be.  Ah well.  But what is really interesting here is the overt display of chumminess with Chris McEleny.  Only a few minutes after he posted his comment, somebody claiming to be McEleny posted a short comment in agreement.  In normal circumstances I would assume that was one of our resident trolls playing silly buggers, but in this case I'm not so sure.  McEleny is an utterly devoted Stew fanboy, and it's precisely the sort of thing he would do - particularly if he and Stew were in regular email or Whatsapp or Signal contact, and Stew was able to alert him to what he had just posted.

If Stew and McEleny are indeed as thick as thieves as they appear to be, I'm wondering how Stew has reacted to McEleny's expulsion from Alba.  He's never actually been particularly supportive of Alba when it really mattered, so this might be the excuse he needed to make a complete break from Alba and go in all guns blazing for what he would call "Reform 1, Reform 2" at next year's Holyrood election.  But will even that be enough to make the scales fall from his disciples' eyes?