AN activist member of the SNP – and reader of The National – has queried the party’s stance on members giving it both votes in the Holyrood election in May.

Dave Corns said he has researched the wisdom of voting SNP 1 and 2, claiming the biggest problem is that it could harm the indy cause.

He told The National: “The May election is the most important in our history as far as independence is concerned. There is 100% agreement for voting SNP in the constituency which may even result in a small overall majority.

“However, there is much confusion and division on how we use our vote for the list election with D’Hondt [voting system] being the biggest problem which could be harmful to the cause. Voters need to be more united and need more clarity to bring them together. They’re torn between voting for an SNP majority or the Greens in the list for a pro-independence majority.”

The question spurred Corns, from Dundee, to carrying out research using the 2011 and 2016 election results. Both used the system that calculates constituency votes on first-past-the-post, and D’Hondt for the second, or list vote. Corns worked out how many votes were deducted in each of the eight regions in 2016 and added them together to get the total number of votes actually used for allocating seats, and said he was shocked by his findings.

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“The total list votes cast for the SNP in 2016 was 953,587 and 41.7% of the vote,” he said. “Total votes deducted by D’Hondt was 834,788, meaning only 118,799 were used for seat allocation. D’Hondt deducted at least 100,000 SNP list votes in each of the six regions they failed to win a list seat in and was the only contributor for the failure of the SNP to win any seats in those areas with over three-quarters of a million votes deducted.”

He said his own north-east region in the Holyrood poll returns 10 list MSPs and the SNP would need an additional 70,000 votes to secure just one, whereas the Greens could have gained more had “SNP1, Greens2” been the mantra. Corns said support for the Greens was rising, but many people had told him they would do “what Nicola tells me”, and added: “We all did what Nicola said and gave the SNP our second vote, and that only resulted in four seats.”

A party spokesperson said: “For anyone who backs independence, anything else than giving both votes to the SNP is a potential gift to Boris Johnson, who will use every Trump-like trick he can to try and defy democracy.

“Similar claims were made before the 2016 election and the result was that the SNP was deprived of a majority despite gaining more votes in the constituency contest than in 2011. If you want a referendum and independence then vote SNP 1 and 2.”