1/ A short(ish) thread on Scotland's Additional Member System, and how we've been looking at it wrongly for over 20 years

2/ First a thought experiment: which of the election results below is fairest, and most reflective of the votes cast

3/ If you said election 2 then you can probably stop reading now. I can't help you. If you said election 1, read on

4/ Election 1, btw, where votes cast and seats won are fairly in sync, was the 2016 Holyrood election. Election 2 was UK GE 2015, when the SNP won 95% of Scotland's Westminster seats on 50% of the votes

5/ So why do I say we've been looking at it wrong all this time? Simply put, because since day 1 we've been taught that the constituency vote (our "first" vote) is the important one, and the regional one (our "second" vote) is merely a top up

6/ This has led many to assume that list MSPs are somehow, therefore, second class, less important, pretend even. This simply isn't true, however useless you find the likes of Wells, Fraser and Kelly (and they are)

7/ The truth is it's the regional vote that's the most important in shaping the Parliament, because that's the one that (largely) decides how many seats each party ends up. The constituency vote determines SOME of the bums to fill those seats, but not all

8/ Don't believe me? Here's a handy explainer from New Zealand who use *almost* the same system as Scotland. They just give it a different name – Mixed Member Proportional, or MMP for short
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-mmp/

9/ Note the emphasis on the "party vote", explaining this ahead of the "electorate vote". Contrast with our "constituency then list" mindset

10/ Although the systems in Scotland and NZ are mostly the same, there are differences. The biggest of these are so-called "overhang" seats, which bring the overall result closer to the party votes if/when there are disparities between the party and electorate votes

11/ If Scotland employed overhang seats, the Greens and possibly the Lib Dems would get a few extra seats to compensate for their losing out in the constituencies. @BallotBoxScot explains more here, including how Germany does things slightly different http://ballotbox.scot/the-overhang-oddity

12/ Flipping our idea of AMS elections to region first, constituency second is a massive shift, but for me it takes away the perception of "wasted list votes" that ScotPol Twitter seems so obsessed with, and makes clear why things work the way they do

13/ Most importantly, putting the emphasis on the regional vote as your say in which parties should be represented in Holyrood, takes away the idea of "lending your list vote" to another party. Voting A in the constituency and B on the list makes you a B voter, not an A voter

14/ Instead of lending your list vote to party B, you are instead lending your constituency vote to part A. Let that sink in

15/ Now, I'm not going to tell anyone how to vote, any more than I'd expect the same from someone else. Neither am I going to suggest that there shouldn't be any new independence supporting parties standing in next year's election. However...

16 What I would say is that any new "list-only" parties need to have a reason to exist other than "putting pressure on the SNP". If their only reason to exist is to game the system, skew the result away from proportionality, and remove the yoons then it's a no from me

17/ Scotland will only secure its independence when independence is a majority view. Flooding Holyrood with indy supporting MSPs in order to force another referendum is a risk if there isn't also a majority of votes in favour

18/ And it's the sort of thing that will anger and alienate precisely the people we need to bring to the Yes side - the undecided and "soft no" voters. I'm not even going to get into any risks of "splitting the indy vote"

19/ I completely understand that not everyone agrees with current SNP and Green policy on various issues. I think there is room for more indy supporting parties, offering different policies and a different vision of an independent Scotland rather than being SNP-lite

20/ That's healthy, and entirely in the spirit of PR, where you should be able to happily vote for the party who most aligns with your views, rather than the one who differs the least

21/ The various new indy parties springing up need to focus on their differences to the SNP, rather than their similarities to it. Anything else is gaming the system, and won't be enough to win my vote. And I'm pretty sure I'm far from alone in that regard /end