Tag: Polling

Yet another poll shows Scotland on track for an unrepresentative election due to AMS

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.

PartyConstituency %List vote %
SNP36%26%
Labour20%19%
Green7%16%
Reform UK19%14%
Conservatives9%11%
Lib Dems10%10%

In a properly proportional system, seats should broadly match votes cast. But seat projections for this poll indicate a staggering mismatch between seats and votes.

PartySeat countSeat %
SNP6046.5%
Labour2015.5%
Green1612.4%
Reform1310.1%
Conservatives107.8%
Lib Dems107.8%

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 for 60 seats – almost half of those available.

READ MORE: Dual mandates ban passed unanimously in Scottish Parliament

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 is 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 is 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.

Ipsos 19-25 Feb seat projection (vs last poll / vs 2021 on new boundaries); AMS Ideal seats:SNP ~ 60 (nc / -3); 38Lab ~ 20 (+1 / -1); 25Grn ~ 16 (-1 / +6); 22RUK ~ 13 (-4 / +13); 18Con ~ 10 (-1 / -21); 14LD ~ 10 (+5 / +6); 12(Projection caveats: ballotbox.scot/projections)

— Ballot Box Scotland (@ballotbox.scot) 2026-03-04T12:14:19.995Z

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.

READ MORE: Scotland must follow Wales on four-year terms

New Scottish poll shows why it’s time to ditch Holyrood’s voting system

By Richard Wood

The latest poll from Ipsos shows why it’s time to ditch the Additional Member System used to elect MSPs.

The company’s latest survey grabbed the headlines for placing Reform second, behind the SNP, on the constituency vote. Neither Nigel Farage’s rising party, nor UKIP before it, have even won seats at Holyrood so this result would be a seismic shift in political behaviour.

However, beneath the headlines of Reform’s surge, the polling numbers alongside seat projections tell a different story. One of a creaking electoral system past its best.

The poll puts the SNP on 35% and 28% for constituency and list vote shares respectively. According to projections by Ballot Box Scotland, that is estimated to give the party 60 seats. That’s almost 47% of seats available.

The difference is staggering. Under AMS where seats are meant to match list vote share, BBS projects that the party would likely win around 40 seats. That’s still above the 28% of seats they would be entitled to under a fully proportional system (usual caveats about different voting systems impacting voting intention).

The biggest difference here is with the SNP. The party has lost significant support since 2021 but benefits from a fragmented unionist vote, with four parties competing for anti-independence voters – namely the Lib Dems, Labour, Conservatives and Reform.

BBS projects Scottish Labour would win 19 seats if Scotland voted like this. That’s 4 fewer than if a more proportional AMS was used (23).

Reform lose out the most, projected to win 6 short of the 23 they would win in a “better AMS”.

The Greens are projected to win 17 seats (AMS ideal: 21), the Conservatives 11 (AMS ideal: 14) and the Lib Dems 5 (compared to 8 under AMS ideal).

READ MORE: Dual mandates ban passed unanimously in Scottish Parliament

This result would mark a major shift in Scottish party politics, and a major decline in support for the Westminster duopoly. But that change risks not being fully shown in terms of seats.

Next year marks 27 years of devolution and the seventh Scottish election. Wales has reviewed and changed its fairly disproportional voting system for something somewhat better. Scotland’s seventh parliament should legislate to do the same.

READ MORE: Scotland’s STV council elections show England a better way of doing local democracy

The risk of 2021 was Alex Salmond’s Alba gaming the system to win a disproportionate independence supermajority. As we know, that outcome never emerged. This time, the threat of a seriously disproportionate election result comes from something much more likely. If the results in May look something like this, let’s hope they’re a wake-up call to our new legislators.