The voting system has been as important as any policy in this Scottish Parliament election

While certain issues have been to the fore at this election – education, taxation, a second independence referendum – another issue has been lurking in the background.

It didn’t appear in any manifesto and wasn’t discussed in debates, but the vagaries of the voting system for Scottish Parliament election had as big an influence on the outcome as any policy and was integral to most party campaign strategies.

Prior to the day, with the SNP looking set to win most, if not all, constituencies – and the yellow map following last year’s first-past-the-post Westminster election in everyone’s minds – with a few notable exceptions, it was the regional lists where the battle for votes was really fought.

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Back in March Ruth Davidson told Holyrood she was focusing on the regional lists. And while Labour wasn’t explicit about its intentions, this is the first election where their aspirations were keenly placed within the list system.

Holding a motion on the SNP’s #bothvotessnp campaign message at party conference initially seemed strange and a little paranoid. What party needs to remind its own members to vote for it?

But the election results show they were on the money. A 1.1 per cent increase in the constituency vote led to six more constituencies, but this, along with a 2.3 per cent drop in the regional vote, helped lose them 12 regional MSPs. 

Labour came second in the constituency vote, slightly ahead of the Conservatives, but that didn’t count for anything, because they lost 12 constituency seats and came third in the regional list.

Increasingly, it is the regional lists that count. Whether a party wins or loses most constituencies, it will be their list votes that determine what share of MSPs they get.

And it may be time to look again at the voting system. Yes, the overall result is roughly proportionate, but the question is whether it was what everyone actually wanted.

I suspect most engaged voters could have divided their party preferences into three categories: the party they really wanted to win, the party they really didn’t want to get in and another party they’d be prepared to take as second choice – not quite as good as the one they actually wanted, but infinitely preferable to the one they couldn’t stand.

That may have been on left-right lines, on the constitutional question, or right down to personality preferences.

Going into the election, voters needed to keep in mind not only their preference, but possible unintended consequences. What if by voting the wrong way you gave the party you really didn’t want an in by splitting the opposition? And if the party you really wanted to win was only standing on the regional lists, what do you do with that first vote?

Add to that the two votes and you’ve got a complex algorithm that no one can possibly work out. It’s a bit like a giant national poker game where you have to weigh up what cards everyone else might be likely to play and how that will affect your hand.

And after 17 years of devolution, it still has to be explained to voters that the two votes are meant to be a check and balance for proportionality – they are different votes and not a first and second choice.

Proportional representation should simplify things and take away the issue of votes, perhaps for smaller parties, that end up not really counting under first past the post. The idea is that your vote counts directly towards the share of the MSPs. You should be able to vote for the party you want, not work out which one has the best chance.

Everyone in Scotland is represented by eight MSPs, only one of which is their constituency MSP. Dropping the constituency element altogether and replacing the closed party lists with open lists in perhaps slightly smaller multi-member regions would allow voters to choose both the party and the person they want to represent them.

And then we could be sure the result is exactly what the people asked for.