Thoughts on tactical voting in the South of Scotland

Could I gently ask people to cut me some slack? I’ve got quite a heavy workload at the moment – I’m writing daily constituency profiles for The National, I’ve still got to finish my monthly column for iScot, and I’m trying to keep the blog ticking over as well, so that doesn’t leave me an awful lot of time for dealing with comment moderation. I genuinely had no option but to turn pre-moderation on – since I came out in support of Alba for the list vote, the level of abuse and vitriol in the comments has gone completely beyond a joke. But if your comment isn’t approved quickly, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s been deleted, it just means there are only so many hours in a day. Every comment needs to be approved or rejected individually.

Some people have emailed asking me for advice on tactical voting in specific regions. All I can really say is I don’t believe in tactical voting on the list. I’m advocating an Alba list vote because I think Alba are the best party, and that’s the way the list vote should be used. I know there’s a slight paradox there because Alba themselves do advocate gaming the list system, but that doesn’t particularly worry me – all parties look for an angle to try to maximise their vote.

As for the claims that ‘both votes SNP’ makes sense in the South of Scotland in a way that it doesn’t elsewhere, it’s not as simple as people are making out. It’s true that the SNP will probably win list seats in the South and that they could therefore take a hit if they lose list votes, but it doesn’t automatically follow that an SNP list vote is the best way of maximising pro-indy representation in the region. They’ll win constituency seats in the South as well, which means the d’Hondt formula will reduce their list vote drastically before a single list seat is allocated – and that in turn means that if Alba get over the de facto threshold of 5% or 6%, you could potentially get more bang for your buck in the South by voting Alba. But the big question is: will they get over the threshold? This is the problem with trying to game the system: to make it work reliably, you need to know in advance how everyone else is going to vote, and that’s not possible. It’s much simpler just to vote for your first choice party on the list.

I’ve also seen another bogus claim about how the system works, and ironically it’s been trotted out by both Alba supporters and detractors. The suggestion is that the better the SNP do in terms of constituency seats, the better Alba will do in terms of list seats. That’s a lovely thought but it isn’t actually true. If the SNP are severely over-represented in a region’s constituency seats, the list seats are effectively spread more thinly in trying to compensate the other parties. So in some cases Alba will have less chance of a list seat if the SNP do well in the constituencies. But that doesn’t matter because Alba’s aim is to maximise pro-indy representation, and voting SNP on the constituency ballot certainly has that effect.

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You can catch-up with Episode 6 of the Scot Goes Popcast, in which I speak to Alba Party leader Alex Salmond, HERE (with video) or HERE (audio only). And if you find Scot Goes Pop’s coverage of polls helpful and would like it to continue, I’m currently running a fundraiser HERE.