Scotland 2011 - Results Thread

[Foucaulf]

Iain Gray reelected, thank god.

Iain Gray was 151 votes from defeat. Damn, do Scotland election laws allow for requested recounts?

I'm looking at these results with great bewilderment. I keep hearing about the "historic" quality of the election, but has it gotten to the point where a SNP majority independence referendum majority is possible?

[Foucaulf]

Some dude on BBC, a statistician, says the SNP will inevitably win a majority of constituency seats...but many of Labour's constituency candidates aren't on the list.  So a bunch of new Labour list MSPs on tap...

Makes no sense to me.

Scotland's voting system is essentially Mixed Member Proportional (MMP), where proportional lists are used to balance out disproportionate FPTP landslides.

Let's say a region has an overall vote of 40% SNP to 30% Labour. The region covers the same area as ten constituencies. The SNP wins every constituency, so the SNP sends 10 MSPs to Holyrood on the first vote. The SNP, however, has won such a disproportionate amount of seats that it will not gain any seats in the regional vote, even if it wins 40% of the vote there. Labour, winning 30% of the regional vote, gains 4 seats out of 7 available, because it received 50% of all the non-SNP votes.

Of course a Labour candidate running in a constituency can be placed on the list, but they can't be placed too high up - what if the candidate is eligible for both? Instead, they'll placed near the back end of the list, just in case. But Scottish Labour has even failed to do that, and when Labour gets its inevitable compensation you're going to see unknowns get elected, because the party never expected getting that many regional seats (or losing that many constituencies)

[Foucaulf]

Really hoping we'll still have a United Kingdom by the time Scotland has another election...

The United Kingdom of England and Northern Ireland, of course!

Fantastic news for the SNP - one of the few times MMP has produced a majority government. Independence, however, is a completely different matter. As far as I understood it, the SNP campaigned on their record of good governance, destroying the bogeymen traditional parties have set onto it. Focusing on an outsider issue like independence will shock their support down and keep it that way.

Plus the SNP has to figure out the date. It can't be too soon to prevent the support shock, but it can't be near the end of their mandate (as they claim) because god knows where Scotland would be by then. With everyone expecting a referendum, they can't wait until the last minute to announce it. As soon as they announce it, the press will make independence the hot-button issue. All of this distracts voter attention away from the SNP's good policy, which moves the state of the parties to an equilibrium.

At the last minute, I would predict Scots would have had enough of the political muddling and vote No to avoid the legal mess that follows. Maybe Labour would have bounced ahead in England by then.