"The Electoral Commission has called for new legal controls over misinformation from AI chatbots, after a thinktank found they had made serious mistakes during the recent Scottish election.
The thinktank Demos said its investigation had found that AI services gave voters misinformation to 34% of the questions it posed"
Interesting side note on this question: the percentage difference between list and constituency votes, be party, was as follows:
SNP: 28.63%
Labour: 17.32%
#ReformUKLtd: 5.92%
#Tories: 0.007% <<<<< tribal or what?!?
#LibDems: 17.28%
#Green: -512.9%
I'd always had Labour down as the most tribal party in Scotland, but look at those Tories go!
It's worth pointing out that Angus Robertson did not come second behind Lorna Slater, but third, so if @ScottishGreens had not stood in Edinburgh Central, he might still not have won, and indeed #ScottishLabour might have got it.
Right, so, hypothetically, supposing that @ScottishGreens had stood candidates in all constituencies, and supposing that all those quarter million people had voted #Green on the constituency vote, the #SNP would have LOST 17 constituencies as compared to their actual score, and the Greens would have won only 2 additional constituencies -- a net loss on the constituencies of 15 seats for #ScottishIndependence.
/Continued
@nusher @ScottishGreens Yes, it could. Or several other things. But I'm looking at the roughly quarter of a million voters who voted Green on the list but not the constituency, and the roughly quarter of a million who voted #SNP on the constituency but not on the list, and wondering whether those are the same people.
And, if they are the same people, how many of them would have voted #Green on the constituency if they could have.
I'm currently doing a hypothetical....
The @ScottishGreens received 269,436 FEWER votes on the constituency ballot than they did on the list; the SNP received 251,128 MORE. So that's probably something fairly close to quarter of a million votes -- or 28% of the SNP's total vote -- that #Greens voters lent to the SNP on the constituency.
To my surprise, there were a total of 6,353 MORE list votes, across the whole of #Scotland, than constituency votes: that is, someone who DID vote on the list who DID NOT vote on the constituency ballot.
I'm going to guess that those were probably mainly @ScottishGreens voters who could not bring themselves to vote #SNP
Right, I've put a spreadsheet of #Holyrood election data up here that I've reverse engineered from Wikipedia data. It's not perfect but at least it does give numbers to do some analysis from. Feel free to use it in any way you like; but if anyone has a better spreadsheet, I would be really grateful.
https://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/tmp/holyrood_election_2026_wikipedia.ods
Six weeks of UK media headlines. The election is done. Now we can compare.
Reform UK received 2.23x more coverage in UK-wide outlets than Scottish outlets from the same publishers. Their vote share was 2.21x higher in England than Scotland.
The Scottish Greens finished third in Holyrood. Their co-leader received zero BBC Scotland mentions in the six weeks before polling day.
Some more findings, including how UK and Scottish editions frame the same stories differently:
https://raffkarva.com/blog/posts/media/after-the-votes-were-counted/
#Scotland #Holyrood2026 #media #linguistics #data #RaffsReflections
Does anyone have a comprehensive spreadsheet of the #Holyrood2026 results that they're prepared to share? It's obvious that BallotBoxScotland has a really good one, but as far as I can see he's not sharing it. SPICe say they're getting their figures from the BBC website(!), but I can't find a spreadsheet download there, either.
I mean I could web-scrape the BBC and Wikipedia, but surely someone's got something?
Simon Brooke
Raff Karva