Salmond will help the Nationalists, but Galloway’s party is bad news for Unionists

Two decades after devolution, the Scottish Parliament’s election system still confuses ordinary voters and seasoned political observers alike. Politicians on both the Unionist and Nationalist sides have capitalised on this complexity, putting forward new parties – most prominently George Galloway’s Alliance for Unity (A4U) and Alex Salmond’s Alba – that aim to game the system and maximise their side’s (on the matter of the constitution) number of MSPs by pulling regional list votes away from the major parties.

But in fact, beneath its byzantine name and workings, Scotland’s modified d’Hondt Additional Member Electoral System translates to straightforward arithmetic, with a clear and inescapable conclusion: Galloway’s A4U gambit is likely to backfire, doing real damage to the Unionist cause. On the other hand, the mathematical structure of Scottish elections means that Alba is much better positioned to succeed, and has the potential to artificially inflate the Nationalist share of MSPs.

The main reason that these parallel ventures have such divergent chances of success is that most Nationalist MSPs are elected with constituency votes, while most Unionist MSPs are elected from list votes.