By Richard Wood
A new poll suggests that the Scottish Parliament is on track for a highly unrepresentative election despite Holyrood’s supposedly proportional voting system.
The Ipsos Scotland Political Pulse poll for STV puts the SNP first in terms of list votes, constituency votes and projected seats.
| Party | Constituency % | List vote % |
| SNP | 36% | 26% |
| Labour | 20% | 19% |
| Green | 7% | 16% |
| Reform UK | 19% | 14% |
| Conservatives | 9% | 11% |
| Lib Dems | 10% | 10% |
In a properly proportional system, seats should broadly match votes cast. But projected vote tallies for this poll indicate a staggering mismatch between seats and votes.
| Party | Seat count | Seat % |
| SNP | 60 | 46.5% |
| Labour | 20 | 15.5% |
| Green | 16 | 12.4% |
| Reform | 13 | 10.1% |
| Conservatives | 10 | 7.8% |
| Lib Dems | 10 | 7.8% |
The biggest divergence between seats and votes here is with the SNP. Support for the party has fallen dramatically to 26% of list votes and 36% of seats. But projections indicate they are on track 60 seats – almost half of those available.
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The main driver behind this mismatch is driven by the dominance of First Past the Post seats used in Scotland’s Additional Member System, an imbalanced ratio of 73 to 56. This makes it theoretically possible for a party to win a majority on constituency seats alone.
The SNP are doing better than other competitive parties on the constituency ballot, and due to their success, they are on track to win the vast majority of constituency seats and close to a majority of seats overall.
The SNP are set to win more seats than they are entitled to if Holyrood had a mechanism to address parties winning more seats than they proportionally should on the constituency vote. In fact, Ballot Box Scotland estimates that the poll puts them on a staggering 22 seats more than what they should win if seats were determined by the proportional ballot alone in different Scottish regions.
Scotland’s new Parliament is likely going to be highly disproportionate. Holyrood’s new MSPs should address this with electoral reform.
Full details of the poll from STV can be read here.
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