Several weeks after I first said I was backing Alba on the list ballot, I’m still having to pre-moderate comments on this blog, because the level of trolling is absolutely intolerable. Some of it is out-and-out abuse, but a lot of it is playground insults. To give an example, I deleted a comment on my YouTube channel the other day from Angela Leitch calling me a “halfwit”. That’s literally all the comment said – “he’s a halfwit”. That probably wouldn’t fall foul of any hate crime legislation, but when I’m getting that sort of thing twenty or thirty times a week, it becomes more than a little wearing.
Luckily with pre-moderation on, the trolls are screaming into the ether, and their comments are going unread and unreplied to.
Nevertheless, I’m going to make a rare exception and reply to one attempted comment from earlier today, because apart from the standard insult, it also contained an erroneous claim of fact that the troll in question presumably believed to be true – specifically that Alba cost the SNP a list seat in the north-east. This is a very silly myth that simply refuses to die, so I’m going to walk you through the arithmetic in excruciating detail to demonstrate that Alba made no difference to the north-east result whatsoever.
The actual number of list votes for the main parties in the north-east was as follows…
SNP 147,910
Conservatives 110,555
Labour 41,062
Greens 22,735
Liberal Democrats 18,051
Alba 8,269
So as a hypothetical exercise let’s assume that Alba had never existed and all of their 8,269 votes had gone to the SNP instead. That would have made the result –
SNP 156,179
Conservatives 110,555
Labour 41,062
Greens 22,735
Liberal Democrats 18,051
And the seat allocation would have worked out as follows…
First list seat:
The d’Hondt calculation divides the SNP’s vote by ten (because they won nine constituency seats) and the Conservatives’ vote by two (because they won one constituency seat).
Conservatives 55,278
Labour 41,062
Greens 22,735
Liberal Democrats 18,051
SNP 15,618
Conservatives win first list seat
Second list seat:
The d’Hondt calculation divides the SNP’s vote by ten (because they’ve already won nine seats) and the Conservatives’ vote by three (because they’ve already won two seats).
Labour 41,062
Conservatives 36,852
Greens 22,735
Liberal Democrats 18,051
SNP 15,618
Labour win second list seat
Third list seat:
The d’Hondt calculation divides the SNP’s vote by ten (because they’ve already won nine seats), the Conservatives’ vote by three (because they’ve already won two seats) and Labour’s vote by two (because they’ve already won one seat).
Conservatives 36,852
Greens 22,735
Labour 20,531
Liberal Democrats 18,051
SNP 15,618
Conservatives win third list seat
Fourth list seat:
The d’Hondt calculation divides the SNP’s vote by ten (because they’ve already won nine seats), the Conservatives’ vote by four (because they’ve already won three seats) and Labour’s vote by two (because they’ve already won one seat).
Conservatives 27,639
Greens 22,735
Labour 20,531
Liberal Democrats 18,051
SNP 15,618
Conservatives win fourth list seat
Fifth list seat:
The d’Hondt calculation divides the SNP’s vote by ten (because they’ve already won nine seats), the Conservatives’ vote by five (because they’ve already won four seats) and Labour’s vote by two (because they’ve already won one seat).
Greens 22,735
Conservatives 22,111
Labour 20,531
Liberal Democrats 18,051
SNP 15,618
Greens win fifth list seat
Sixth list seat:
The d’Hondt calculation divides the SNP’s vote by ten (because they’ve already won nine seats), the Conservatives’ vote by five (because they’ve already won four seats), Labour’s vote by two (because they’ve already won one seat) and the Greens’ vote by two (because they’ve already won one seat).
Conservatives 22,111
Labour 20,531
Liberal Democrats 18,051
SNP 15,618
Greens 11,368
Conservatives win sixth list seat
Seventh list seat:
The d’Hondt calculation divides the SNP’s vote by ten (because they’ve already won nine seats), the Conservatives’ vote by six (because they’ve already won five seats), Labour’s vote by two (because they’ve already won one seat) and the Greens’ vote by two (because they’ve already won one seat).
Labour 20,531
Conservatives 18,426
Liberal Democrats 18,051
SNP 15,618
Greens 11,368
Labour win seventh list seat
So in total the Tories win four list seats, Labour two and the Greens one – exactly the same as the real result. The SNP aren’t even vaguely close to getting a look-in, even with the help of the extra Alba votes.
Why on earth, then, are some people so utterly convinced that Alba cost the SNP a seat in the north-east? It’s actually an embarrassingly elementary “two plus two equals twenty-two” type error. What they’re doing is looking at the d’Hondt calculation for the final seat, spotting that the SNP were “only” a few thousand votes adrift, and thinking to themselves “aha, if Alba’s 8000 votes had come across, we’d have taken that seat”. But what they’re forgetting is that d’Hondt would have divided those extra votes by ten, just like all the other votes for the SNP.
