heathcote wrote:
The whole lot is a mess, you are asking for trouble operating 2 voting systems running alongside each other, 1st past the post and proportional representation, the 2 do not mix.
Fair point, but if it had been FPTP only, SNP would have got 62 of 73 seats on 47.7% of the vote.
And recall that in 2015, the SNP got 56 out of 59 the Scottish MPs in the Westminster vote, on around half the vote. Imagine results like that for the whole UK at Westminster
So it's either the current part FPTP/part PR, or the SNP effectively cop the lot if it's full FPTP, or it's wholesale change to a full PR system. But for obvious reasons it's not going to be fundamentally changed any time soon.
Of course, no doubt the SNP are popular, but FPTP gives them far more seats than their level of popularity merits, because there's basically three opposition unionist parties, and that splits the opposition vote. So to that degree the seats won on a more proportional basis evens things up a bit.
In fact the mixed voting system was designed to stop any one party getting an overall majority, and they thought our politics would be more consensual as a result
Obviously it didn't quite work out as intended, but the system has stopped the SNP getting the vast majority of the seats on a minority of the votes.